metalhead gallery

As far as I'm concerned, Roky Erickson wrote the best collection of rock songs of all time with 'The Evil One.' Sure, they may very well have been written during the most troubling time of the poor guy's life, as he battled paranoid schizophrenia, electroconvulsive therapy, and a metric shit-ton of personal demons, but the staggering quality and timelessness of those tracks are undeniable (to put things in perspective, I was only four when those songs were released, and I'm old as shit now).


So it's 30 years later and Roky is no longer the mail-obsessed agoraphobic unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic as depicted in the documentary film You're Gonna Miss Me. His musical career has been revived with the assistance of Austin's Okkervil River, a band I was previously unfamiliar with but serves as a passable backdrop to Roky's first recorded material in 15 years. Truthfully, I was initially disappointed with True Love Cast Out All Evil - the songs have virtually none of the horror-alien-rock vibe of The Evil One (only 'John Lawman' comes close, despite containing only one more verse than 'I Walked with a Zombie'), instead opting for folksy acoustics and devotional hymns that often alternate between sounding too sparse or too convoluted. It's obviously a long way from 'Bloody Hammer' to 'God is Everywhere', and the toll of Roky's troubled past is evident... he sounds less like a rock n' roll LSD warrior and more like a spiritually fragile old man. Which, you know... he is.



Fortunately, Roky's voice is still a very powerful instrument, and I'm bewitched by it enough to have finally allowed these tracks to sink in. Will Sheff's production may not be all that I was hoping for, but I've come around to realizing that the very fact that this record even exists is reason enough to celebrate it. If you didn't know, the majority of these tracks are comprised of unreleased material over Roky's decades-long career, and even includes found sound and archival recordings from the time spent confined at a hospital for the criminally insane in the early 70's.

Put down that corny Watain CD and check out a musician who has lived through some REAL darkness.

Tracklist:
1. Devotional Number One
2. Ain’t Blues Too Sad
3. Goodbye Sweet Dreams
4. Be and Bring Me Home
5. Bring Back the Past
6. Please, Judge
7. John Lawman
8. True Love Cast Out All Evil
9. Forever
10. Think Of As One
11. Birds’d Crash
12. God Is Everywhere

Goodbye Sweet Dreams