13th Floor Elevators – Easter Everywhere International Artists IA LP 5 (1967)
Strangely enough, Easter Everywhere manages to be a psych-rock classic. The epic opener “Slip Inside This House” is about as good as they come. After that, things may seem a little more uneven than the debut The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, but given a little more time this album reveals itself as something just as finely crafted, if even weirder and darker. Conventional judgment might call this a poor recording, given the tuneless vocals and guitar–and it’s fair to call them tuneless in the sense that they make pervasive forays into atonality–but it’s precisely those elements that make this so very psychedelic. A cover of Dylan‘s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (shortened to just “Baby Blue”) winds up being almost as compelling as “Slip Inside the House.” This feels like all the unexpected and unpredictable energy of the 1960s coming to a head.