A fleeting glance at the 3CD package aside, the 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah is quite different from many of its milestone predecessors. But then the creation of the group’s eighth album was really unlike most other such efforts in the iconic band’s discography. Songs such as “Eyes of the World,” “Scarlet Begonias,” and “Crazy Fingers” sound like passages lifted directly from a lucid Grateful Dead jam, then crystallized through the application of the enlightened metaphysics of Robert Hunter’s poetry. Especially with five decades of retrospect, it’s a miraculous sighting because, following the aforementioned autumn run of the previous year, the future of the Grateful Dead was anything but certain. As such, it is of a piece with more than a few Grateful Dead album covers, constituting a reliable gateway into the musical journey of (re) discovery that materializes straight from perusal of those graphics.