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.