Living legends, from little Richard to Hasil Adkins to Roky Erickson, are always figures whose creative lives are imperiled by their notoriety. For Erickson, leader of the mid-'60s psychedelic pioneers 13th Floor Elevators, the legend and the peril are deeply intertwined with a history of drugs, schizophrenia and institutionalization.

It is tempting, then, to praise or dismiss Erickson's new album, All That May Do My Rhyme, as an expression of crazy genius, a Syd Barrett-style retropsychedelic wig out. But Rhyme is hardly retro, hardly wigged out. It is a brilliant trip through a variety of pop-music genres, encompassing everything from strummy country folk to Buddy Holly-esque rock & roll to blues stomp – and that's only on the album's two radically different versions of "Starry Eyes," one a duet with Austin, Texas, R&B queen Lou Ann Barton.

Rhyme does not, however, trade Erickson's status as a visionary for the comforts of pastiche. If Erickson covers a lot of territory, it is because his music has always functioned as a living archive of musical form, exploring the seams between supposedly incongruous genres. In their lyrics, Erickson's songs explore another kind of seam: the boundaries between lucidity, delirium and obsession, as well as the lucidities of delirium and obsession. For Erickson, ever the romantic balladeer, love in all its varieties is a kind of eternal return whose every moment is catastrophic, a lightning bolt that doesn't herald love or rain but simply an eternity of lightning, a hurt that turns time into a living wound (as on "You Don't Love Me Yet" and "Haunt"). It's a storm like many other storms – witness the courtroom drama of "Please Judge" – that can't be ducked.

On All That May Do My Rhyme, as in all his music of the past 30 years, Roky Erickson dances with the terrors of the abyss and leads the whole night through. (RS 708)

TRENT HILL