When I first discovered this album I was in high school in '82. I bought the LP and started to feel ill, so I went home, grabbed my headphones, put the needle on the record and laid down on the couch. As the first side progressed, my temperature rose as I settled into what later became mono. I quickly became delirious and began to hover in a hallucinatory state as the music filled me. Who knows if I was still awake when the first side ended, but apparently I got up and flipped the record at some point. The perspectives in the music were distorted and mixed up. Drums were obviously being played loudly, but were buried in the mix as if they were screaming in vain to be heard. Voices whispered, crooned, howled, laughed and threatened. Hammond organs melted into harpsichords. The bass player sounded like he was either tuning up throughout the whole album or he was just kidding around. Acoustic guitars sounded impossibly swollen, as if they were trying to make the needle jump out of the groove. The lyrics were evocative of everything and nothing but in my fevered mind made perfect sense. Afraid that words would fail him, the writer used them all up as quickly as he could. I listened to this album over and over when I was in bed for weeks, trying in vain to grasp it's scope. Staring at the lyric sheet didn't help as the lyrics were all smashed together with no gaps in a single block of typewritten text as if were some sort of ransom note. The whole album sounded like the inside of someone's head with thoughts spilling every which way, some resolved, most unresolved. When I was well, I revisited the album, sure that I had imagined the whole thing. I hadn't. It remains one of my favorite E.C. albums and one of my all time favorites. Always compelling and a true one of a kind. Elvis and the Attractions all sound like they're at their wits' end, racing against madness that is hot on their trails, expressing the race in a musical language all their own. Masterpiece, for sure. (I personally prefer the Ryco version with bonus tracks on one disc, as the bonus tracks provide relief in the form of a somewhat light-hearted postscript to the intensities preceding.)