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Friday 6th April 2012
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On Our iPod

Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”

Chris Devotion & The Expectations - Amalgamation & Capital (album)

Trailer Trash Tracys - Ester (album)

Throwing Up - Mother Knows Best 7”

Howling Wolf - Complete Chess Masters 1951-60

The Ketamines - A Rotten Bond/1 Yr (from Oddbox Singles Club Pt 2)

Cardinal - Hymns (album)

Proper Ornaments - Taking the Gamble Out of Buying 12”

Darren Hayman - January Songs (album)

Various: Marshall Teller EP 12”

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Album Review

Roky Erickson with Okkervil River
True Love Cast Out All Evil Chemikal Underground

Article written by - Jun 7, 2010

Roky Erickson with Okkervil River: True Love Cast Out All Evil

The Roky Erickson story will surely be filmed one day as it has everything; from inventing psychedelic music with the 13th Floor Elevators and being dosed with LSD before every gig, teaching Janis Joplin how to howl, incarceration for possession of a joint and brutal electro-shock and Thorazine “therapy”, bouts of mental illness, a fight for his guardianship between his mother and his brother…And you thought the Johnny Cash story was dramatic. The good news is that Roky’s going through a sort of indian summer, performing and singing again after meeting a producer that understands him (Will Sheff) and, in Okkervil River, a sympathetic band who can do justice to his songs.

Though the songs have been carefully arranged by Sheff and band, there’s no question that these songs are Roky’s - the majority of them were written during his time at Rusk Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane and appear in both ‘Openers’ lyric book collections. Okkervil River simply provide a rich backing, a far cry from all those lumpen bar bands Roky used to play with. Two tracks use recordings by Roky’s mother from Rusk, and all seem affected in some way by the prison experience: ‘Ain’t Blues Too Sad’ even includes the line: “electricity hammered me through my head”. Versions of some of these songs have been heard before on labels like Trance Syndicate and Emperor Jones in the 1990s but the whole approach taken on the current release just feels like the right one for Roky – who’s clearly in a better place now – and for us.

The album reinforces Roky’s reputation as a songwriter; ‘Forever’ is the sort of epic that Johnny Cash might have sung while ‘Think Of As One’ has a sweet country kick. And the band intensify the effect by providing the right backing, from the countryish ‘Bring Back to the Past’ to the hard rock of ‘John Lawman’ and the psych pop of ‘Goodbye Sweet Dreams’, where guitars shriek like unhappy spirits. Sheff has judged the mood well by mixing field sounds and scraps of old recordings (‘Please Judge’ contains the sound of cicadas from Roky’s backyard) that personalise the album. We fans feared he was too far gone to make an album this good but clearly Roky’s fallen in with the right people. As he sings on ‘God is Everywhere’, it’s a case of “thought-lost and never-known treasures coming back to we”. Treasure indeed.

Links:
http://www.rokyerickson.net/
http://www.chemikal.co.uk/roky-erickson.htm
http://www.myspace.com/rokyerickson