The genesis of psychedelia is here, in these grooves, in this expanded space filled with luminescent reverberations.
"You're Gonna Miss Me" is the most famous song, perhaps overrated, but nothing more than an entertaining raga; already "Roller Coaster" stands as an ode to lysergic ecstasy with its mind open to decades of future music. The exhausting juggling that characterizes the whole album here is fascinating and paradigmatic; in "Splash 1" begins what ended in "You're Gonna Miss Me", love. The song is almost blues, delicate and sorrowful with lysergic splashes here and there. "Reverberation" is the fruit of an acid trip, evidently, and comes from a hidden and strange corner of the minds of Hall, Erickson, and Southerland; "Don't Fall Down" is a negligible little song like "You Don't Know"; "Fire Engine" is psychopathic, and Hall's exhausting use of the jug starts to become truly annoying.
The other songs neither add nor subtract anything from the album, which remains a milestone more for what it started than for its actual quality, since it is still rather crude.
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Other reviews
By psychopompe
The 13th Floor Elevators embody the most spontaneous and sincere idea of psychedelia.
This very instrument with its disorienting sound… gives the compositions a subtly unsettling and deeply hallucinogenic character.
By CaseyJones
"You’re Gonna Miss Me" created an epochal song, a forerunner of a very cerebral and distorted album.
Forty years later, the charm of the work remains intact in its raw, and perhaps even desperate, sound.