Stronger Than Circumstance

30 Trips Around the Sun is an 80-CD live album, packaged as a box set, by the rock band the Grateful Dead. Announced for the celebration of their 50th anniversary, it consists of 30 complete, previously unreleased concerts—73 hours of music—with one show per year from 1966 through 1995. The box set is individually numbered and limited to 6,500 copies. It was released on October 7, 2015.

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

Grateful Dead - The Arista Years (1996) {2CD Set Arista ‎07822-18934-2 rec 1977-1990}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.00 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 361 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 39 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1977-90, 1996 Grateful Dead / Arista ‎Records | 07822-18934-2
Rock / Classic Rock / Psychedelic / Folk Rock / Jam Band

This well-chosen compilation makes the best of the eight albums (five studio LPs and three live collections) the Grateful Dead released on Arista Records between 1977 and 1990. The first three studio albums are not well regarded, but by focusing on the stronger compositions, such as "Estimated Prophet," "Terrapin Station," "Fire on the Mountain," "I Need a Miracle," and "Saint of Circumstance," the compilers have made them seem better than they did when they were released.