Easter Everywhere

I've been waiting to review this album for sometime.  Today seems as appropriate a day as any, so here it is...  

"Easter Everywhere" by the 13th Floor Elevators is an album which may very well be the band's masterpiece before their inevitable unraveling.  This album is cohesive and versatile, the songs sit comfortably with each other, combining the repetitious and cyclical Psychedelic jams they pioneered with R&B, as well as the more subdued yet beautiful acid folk songs like "Dust" and "I Had to Tell You" Roky brought to the table.  This record is a success on all fronts, in the instrumentation, the cryptic lyrics, and even in the production which is much cleaner and tighter than the first album.  

The album's opener, "Slip Inside This House", is an 8 minute epic, a hypnotic head banger, chronicling the path of self discovery and introspection brought on by the psychedelic experience.  This is one of Tommy Halls better lyrical pieces and Roky Erickson howls them out like a spoken word poem over top of the bands razor sharp cyclical rhythm.  The band effortlessly weaves in and out of phrases blurring the lines and sounds in a truly original fashion.  

Rock stompers like the ethereal "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" and "Levitation", as well as the thunderous "Earthquake" keep the record in the vein of their garage rock roots, taking feedback and manipulating it into a slithery sonic snake that continues to shift it's form, masking the structure of each song.  This is largely indebted to Stacy Sutherland's guitar lines which are incredibly melodic and bridge the gap between the rock tunes and the folk ballads.       

The Bob Dylan cover "Baby Blue" may be the best cover of the song I have heard.  The band takes it and makes it their own, turning it from a lovers goodbye into an LSD comedown.  Roky's voice is perfectly suited for the emotion of the song and subject matter.  While Sutherland's sliding guitar sneaks back into the arrangement and gives a new psychedelic poignancy to the lyrics "the carpet, too, is moving under you".  

"Easter Everywhere" is a perfect example of a band finally capturing the sounds they have been striving towards.  I have never heard a record anywhere close to sounding like this.  I can trace the roots, but the band blends southern folk, with R&B, and Blues based rock in a way that is all their own.    Listen to the record as a whole and let it sink in.  

  

Ty Segall and White Fence- "Hair"

                  

Just when it feels like psychedelic rock has been rehashed to the point of generic predictability, Ty Segall and White Fence take the past and hack it to bits, splicing together a new vision of a well worn piece of rock history.  You can call it psychedelic, you can call it garage, or lo-fi, you can call it whatever you want but I guarantee none of those terms accurately describe 2012s "Hair".  It is a scuzzy collage that embraces slithering psych harmony and punk rock thrash into a disjointed tape-warped frenzy.

Ty Segall and Tim (White Fence) Presley bring their respective influences and styles, fusing them in psych freak outs until they are indiscernible.  Imagine a band of punk rock kids taking acid in the garage and chronicling the trip with some battered mics and an old tape recorder... you'll have some idea of what this record is all about.  That is not to say that their isn't serious thought put into the production.  Tracks pan left and right as quickly as Ty and Tim jump from ideas.  Like both their solo works this record embraces the home recording aesthetic.  Beneath the crackling layers of fuzz there are some great songs with some jam on the side.  

The individual tracks flow together in a stream of conscience fashion.  The start of the trip "Time" finds them in a tug-a-war between floating along the acoustic chord progression and smashing their guitars into a wall of feedback.  It stops and starts, pulling back and forth between sleepy groove and wailing thrash.  The organ and two chord chop of "I Am Not A Game" feels like the anxious rise of a roller coaster about to drop.  When it does, it falls into a pool of blissful harmonies that swirl around your ears, before starting its rigid climb once again.  "Easy Ryder" and "Black Glove/Rag" relaxes a bit and starts to enjoy the less aggressive side of their sound at least for a moment before the wailing punk rock side pushes it's way back into the mix.  "Cry Baby" is a buzzed out boogie featuring Ty's sarcastic howls.  While "(I Can't) Get Around You" is a taste of Tim Presley's Anglo folk psychedelia.  The bipolar thrash returns one last time on "Scissor People"which is a defiant stomp that builds into an electric guitar cacophony as Ty and Tim trade solos.  As the band begins to finally comedown from their high, they ride it out on the sleepy groove of "Tongues", a fitting swan song for this particular go around.  

The record finds both artists in a areas that neither would have been before or are likely to go again.  I for one would welcome another collaboration, especially if it moves on to new territory in the way that "Hair" does.  Check the live jams below.   

    

               

   

  

                                      

Blues Creation

Back to it.

I've been neglecting this page, but the good news is I have a full catalog of (relative) obscurities to post about and share. So we're kicking it off with one of my favorite lesser known psych bands- Blues Creation! Not the Creation and not the blues explosion, we're talking Japanese Hard Psych!

When the fuzzed out tones of 60s psychedelic rock resonated in ears world wide, it did what all good music does, it inspired imitation. Musicians could appropriate the sounds they heard into a new mixture of ideas and sounds from their own culture and thank God. Hardcore fans of the genre will be no strangers to Blues Creation and for good reason. Inspired by the popular American Blues Rock as well as the sludgy riffs of Black Sabbath Blues Creation formed in the late 60s/early 70s. By 1971 they had recorded two albums, but it was their second album "Demon & Eleven Children" that would solidify them in Psychedelic Rock history and lead to an eventual collaboration with Felix Pappalardi (of Mountain). But that is another story.

"Demon & Eleven Children" opens with a sample of lightning and thunder, horses crying out in the storm, giving way to a spiraling electric guitar which swells until the band bursts out of the haze and into a tight and heavy blues rock groove. It is a great introduction to a band that seems to come out of the elements like the psychedelic Japanese priests they were. As soon as you get comfortable with a groove or the band starts to fall into comfortable territory they immediately turn the opposite direction jumping back and forth between styles and tempos alike.

The song "Mississippi Mountain Blues" the second track on the album turns from a traditional acoustic blues song, with harmonica and all the other trappings, and jumps into an electric, ascending run that goes off-kilter before going right back into a more comfortable blues progression. Other tracks like "Just I Was Born" and "Brain Buster" hint at proto punk power fused with the psychedelic guitar wankery that would become a tradition of Japanese Psych. They even mellow it out on the dreamy, slow tempo "One Summer Day". The album could be considered Prog it jumps around so much.

If you love guitar based music this band is a must.  If you are looking for something out of the ordinary this is it.  It may not seem out of this world anymore, but it must have in 1971.

Unfortunately it seems all of "Demon and Eleven Children" has been removed from youtube, otherwise I'd link it.  But here's this--

http://youtu.be/rh1DreByNFQ