Josh T. Pearson The Times live review 26 February 2011
Saturday 26 February 2011
Saturday 19 February 2011
Josh T. Pearson album review 19 February 2011
Louder Than War: Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen
(by Ian Johnston)
Josh T. Pearson’s debut solo album is a solid gold classic. No debate, take it or leave it. The Last Of The Country Gentlemen is country folk music of the most expressively powerful, elemental kind. The product of Pearson’s singular vision and talent, The Last Of The Country Gentlemen evokes the type of deep soul mining music that Johnny Cash would have wholeheartedly approved of and recognised.
Unadorned acoustic guitar and impassioned vocals, with occasional contributions from violinist Warren Ellis of The Dirty Three/Bad Seeds/Grinderman and pianist Dustin O’Halloran, propels Pearson’s seven expansive, bittersweet songs of experience, love and hate with more emotive impact than a thousand screaming electric guitars. Pearson’s compositions will haunt your dreams and waking hours. You have been warned.
Honest to a fault, utterly bold and fearless in its frankness and execution, Last of The Country Gentlemen is not a record you will play every day, but when you do you will listen to it transfixed from beginning to end. There will be moments, and they will come as sure as night follows day, when the only record that you are able to listen to will be Last Of The Country Gentlemen.
The shorthand back-story about how singer/songwriter Pearson reached this point in his highly irregular ‘career’ is as follows, but not overwhelmingly important. Pearson hails from Texas and a Baptist/Pentecostal church background. In 2001, Pearson’s three piece rock band Lift To Experience, released their one and only double album masterwork, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. Brimming with apocalyptic biblical imagery and soaring, feedback overdriven rock guitars, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads was instantly commended by critics and audiences alike as a masterpiece, with the band offered several radio sessions by a smitten John Peel. Not that long after the album was released, Lift To Experience imploded. For the next ten years, Pearson would alternate between hiding away from the prying eyes of the world deep in the heart of Texas and performing odd concerts and shows, in America and Europe, when the muse moved him.
Having abandoned any plans to reform Lift To Experience, Pearson even considered recording a covers album based around songs about loneliness. This was also eventually discarded, but the selection of cover numbers (including Patsy Cline’s ‘Seven Lonely Days’, George Jones’ ‘Lonesome Life’ and ‘Ain’t That Lonely Yet’ by Dwight Yoakam), give some insight into Pearson’s points of reference. A 2006 7’ inch single, split with The Dirty Three, featuring Pearson’s cover of Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and live appearances at The West Country Girl creperie in Paris (above which Pearson was bivouacking for a while) and a couple of performances at some All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals only added to the singer/songwriters growing mystique. Most significant of all is that Pearson has finally chosen to return to the fray, with a new empathetic record label (Mute) and a collection of songs recorded in Berlin in January last year.
Beware; Last Of The Country Gentlemen carries a very hefty emotional punch. Though it sounds absolutely nothing like them, the wayward, obsessive spirit and sardonic gallows humour of such heartbreaking albums as Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, Lee Hazlewood’s Requiem For An Almost Lady or Fred Neil’s eponymous 1966 LP course through the impassioned songs that comprise Last Of The Country Gentlemen. They are expressed in a completely dissimilar style, yet the raw, earthy qualities of Pearson’s compositions withstand comparison with the strength of purpose and intent evinced in Hank Williams’ best early 1950’s MGM singles.
Josh T. Pearson obviously did not have to research this record by consulting other material in any other medium to gain insights; the songs just flowed out of him. To some extent the song titles of Last Of The Country Gentlemen, related in running order, tell the story that the record chronicles: ‘Thou Art Loosed’ ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’, ‘Woman When I’ve Raised Hell’, ‘Honeymoon Is Great, I Wish You Were Her’, ‘Sorry With A Song’, ‘Country Dumb’ and ‘Drive Her Out’. Feelings of guilt, sorrow, devout yearning and self loathing frequently collide throughout the songs, with longing for another demolishing rational thought on ‘Honeymoon Is great, I Wish You Were Her’; “I feel like she can see me, like she’s starin’ right through your goddamned eyes, I kiss your lips and I feel her whisper back up into mine.”
As emotionally harrowing as these devotional tales of love found and lost are (“And I’m so tired of trying to make it right, for a girl who just won’t come to the light, Night after night after night after Christ-haunted night”, bemoans the singer in ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’), Last Of The Country Gentlemen is far from po-faced: during ‘Country Dumb’ Pearson sings, “We’re the kind who start the books but who just do not finish, We’re the kind who have 10,000 would-be-great, ungrateful, too-long, run-on songs.”
It is Pearson’s utter sincerity expressed in his songs, and perhaps his belief that in sharing his experiences of a turbulent relationship he might provide succour to others undergoing the same emotional tumult, that imbues Last Of The Country Gentlemen with a haunting abiding resonance. Yet, as he makes explicit in ‘Sorry With A Song’, he is also aware of the limitations of his craft: “My whole life’s been one clichéd country unfinished line after line after line after line. It’s been the curse of my crazy koo-kooed up clocks most all of my life’s time after time after time.” During ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ Pearson observes, ‘It ain’t Christmas time it’s Easter, Honey Bunny, and I ain’t the Saviour you so desperately need. ‘
Even those whose idea of a spiritual quest is a trip to the off-licence should be profoundly moved by Last Of The Country Gentlemen, due to the universality of the primal emotions revealed and evoked in Pearson’s poignant work. Last Of The Country Gentlemen is roots music looking towards the heavens. Whatever Pearson decides to do next musically (and that could be any direction he chooses, given the material here), Last of The Country Gentlemen is undeniably a very solid foundation upon which to build.
Last Of The Country Gentlemen is a record made by a man because he was compelled to do so, which must surely be the essence of all great music. Whether or not Pearson found making Last Of The Country Gentlemen a cathartic experience or not is unclear, but if you respond to this admirably demanding material you undoubtedly will find catharsis for the broken heart.
Copyright © Ian Johnston 2011
Friday 11 February 2011
Josh T. Pearson My Old Kentucky Blog Interview 11 February 2011
Try as you might, you’ll never convince Josh T. Pearson that he’s a legend. Bring up the ever-expanding myth of Lift To Experience. Point out his rabid following across Europe. Even invoke his staggeringly beautiful solo debut, Last Of The Country Gentlemen, and the most you’ll get is a little nervous laughter and a gentle reminder that it is, and always has been, about “the art.” You can talk yourself blue in the face; he’s not having it.
Of course, Josh T. Pearson is about as far removed as you can be from the prototypical rockstar. Over a decade has passed since he delivered The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads unto the world, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that Elvis sightings have been more pervasive during that period than those of the Denton native. He has spent much of the time in motion, wandering Europe, keeping money in his pocket with occasional gigs and “working at life” as he might say. Even his most steadfast fans had long since closed the curtains on the prospect of a new Josh T. Pearson record. And yet, on March 29th, Mute Records will roll out Last Of The Country Gentlemen.
Last Of The Country Gentlemen is a stunner. Don’t be misled by the ironic title. This is no technicolor, good guy versus bad guy country record, but rather an extended, and often painful rumination, on the frailty of men and women whose wear has left them indistinguishable from their harsh surroundings. The song are long, rambling and at times harrowing, but it’s a record that simply must be digested in its entirety. Even using Mark Kozelek’s most personal Red House Painters material as a reference, Pearson is off the map. Last Of The Country Gentlemen is the single most intense album I’ve heard since Scott Walker’s The Drift, and my only hope is that one day, the humble vessel can listen to it, and truly appreciate its brilliance.
Josh was good enough to chat with MOKB recently about The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, Last Of The Country Gentlemen and some of what came between.
MOKB: According to legend, Lift To Experience performed at the 2000 SXSW festival and signed a label deal on the same day. How long was the band together prior to that?
JTP: With that lineup, going on three years.
MOKB: A lot of people assume Lift To Experience was an overnight sensation?
JTP: No, we worked long and hard before that.
MOKB: In some circles, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads enjoys full-blown cult status-
JTP: Is it a cult record on the American side?
MOKB: In very small circles, but I’m betting the release of Last Of The Country Gentlemen will bolster the reputation of Lift To Experience in the U.S.
JTP: It’s certainly a cult record on the European side of the water. People still talk about it, but in America, we didn’t tour behind it. We didn’t even have an American label at the time.
MOKB: What do you remember about those sessions?
JTP: Well, we worked real long and hard on it. We recorded a version of 1998, but trashed it because wasn’t quite there. So we worked on it another year, and in ’99 we recorded the version that stands now, but we still didn’t have a label. 2000 we got a label and it came out in 2001.
MOKB: At any point during the sessions or the mixing did you look at each other and say, “We have something big here?”
JTP: No. I mean, I knew it was great, but no one else thought it’d be that good. It was my baby. My little project. The boys [drummer Andy "The Boy" Young, and bassist Josh "The Bear" Browning] were real good to help and they were the perfect tools for the job, but no one thought it’d be big. It was just a piece of art.
MOKB: Do you have any idea how many copies of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads have been sold?
JTP: No idea.
MOKB: How did the label react to putting out a double record from an unknown band?
JTP: They fought it pretty hard. Actually, their initial reaction was, “No fucking way.” A couple days later, after he [Cocteau Twins' founder and lead guitarist and Simon Raymonde] passed the idea around other folks at the office, he realized that was the way it needed to be for it to really work. They were in some financial trouble, so they were understandably apprehensive about putting out a double-disc concept record from a Denton, Texas band no one had ever heard of.
And at that time they weren’t even a real label, they’d maybe released a couple Cocteau Twins B-sides. They were basically getting thrown out of their studio and what not. I didn’t have the money to mix it here. I didn’t even have the money to record it here. I still owed money to the people who recorded it here in Denton. They were the only label that offered to put it out, but they didn’t have the money to fly us over to mix it. So they were mixing while they were in the process of being evicted. It was around that time they discovered it was longer than it needed to be for a single CD, so I had the pleasure of explaining to him that it was a double album. Luckily, he liked it enough that he couldn’t say no.
Of course, it was advantageous for them in the end, because it went on to do so well. It ended up saving the label and putting them on the map.
MOKB: Do you think the reputation of Lift To Experience and The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads contributed to the you taking ten years to release your first solo record?
JTP: Yeah. That was part of it. Also, complications about making art and making a living. It’s a trap you fall into when you try to balance making art with making a living.
MOKB: When we think about a record ten years in the making, we think about Axl Rose and the Guns n’Roses album [Chinese Democracy] he finally put out-
JTP: Did he finally put that out?
MOKB: A couple years ago.
JTP: How is it?
MOKB: It’s OK, but I think after waiting that long, people couldn’t help but be disappointed.
JTP: Hmm.
MOKB: Did you ever feel, “Hey, if I don’t get this record out soon, I may never do it?”
JTP: The first couple of years. But it’s always about art with me. It has to be above a certain threshold of quality. There was internal pressure for a while, but there were things I needed to figure out for myself. Recently, there’s been more “shit or get off the shitter.” I wasn’t working on this record for ten years, I was working on life. This record took maybe three months.
MOKB: But you recorded it in two days, so it doesn’t seem that you agonized over the recording process.
JTP: [pause] Well, it about killed me. We recorded one day, then it took about two weeks to recover spiritually before recording again. I wish I’d been a little more practiced, but I wanted to put out a record and I was running out of time. We were in Berlin checking out the studio and I felt pretty good about it, so we gave it a shot.
MOKB: So did you produce the record?
JTP: I mapped it all out and wrote all the music. Words are always tricky, so I worked with a friend to flesh out the ideas.
MOKB: Are we hearing mostly first takes?
JTP: The first three are on Last Of The Country Gentleman are. You know, the songs are so goddamned long. Once you get up over ten minutes, I wasn’t about to do it again. But if you get to minute five and it’s not working, just do it again. I agonized over the takes, rather than the recording process or the mic setups. Being such a personal record, I’m not going to lie, it was tough. Sometimes it would take ten minutes just to recover from a take, sometimes a few hours. I hope I don’t have to go through that again. I actually went gray overnight.
MOKB: Now that it’s done, and it met your standards, how do you feel about the record?
JTP: I don’t know, man. It seems like a terrible thing to do…to be happy about such a sad record. This record is definitely for other people. I can’t listen to it. I think it’s a good work, but I hope I don’t have to look at it for a very long time. It’s just too personal. If I was outside of myself and heard it, I’d think the guy was a real dick for doing it because it’s just too bare and honest.
MOKB: You have some European dates lined up already. How is it going to be performing these songs?
JTP: There will be a couple I can’t play, but I’m working on new material specifically for those shows.
MOKB: Any current music you like?
JTP: I don’t listen to too much music. I mostly play and write. I guess I just like my own songs better.
Wednesday 9 February 2011
Josh T. Pearson album review 9 February 2011
6 Days From Tomorrow: Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen
(by Si)
It lives! I’ve lost all my contact info and my email’s gone all weird, but that’s the price of progress, I guess… I now have another largely unexpected backlog of things that I had either forgotten I’d ordered or that had arrived earlier than expected.
In the latter of these two categories comes this absolute pearler of a record that seemingly isn’t out until next month, but that very kindly arrived last week thanks to the lovely mail-order types at Rough Trade records, who also see fit to add an exclusive bonus disc into the bargain. And given that my sole prior recollection of this artist was from a singularly intense support slot from a few years ago, this debut album is a huge surprise and yet another indication that 2011 is shaping up to be a brilliant and incredibly varied year for amazing music…
My only contact with Josh T. Pearson prior to this was as support to the Soulsavers back in July 2007, and the lasting impression I got from this was ‘pleasantly intimidating’ – plenty of Fire and Brimstone going on from an imposing figure totally committed to his performance and a guitar style bordering on destruction, coupled with a polite grace between songs, most memorably when he humbly introduced his cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart as if he needed permission from the Manchester audience to play it.
And now, almost four years later, his debut solo album has arrived and contains all the charm, passion and frailties of that performance. Last Of The Country Gentlemen may ‘only’ contain seven tracks, but it runs for almost an hour bookended by two short-ish (by comparison) songs, opener Thou Art Loosed with its refrain of “I’m off to save the World / At least I can hope” and closing with Drive Her Out‘s plea of “Help me and drive her out of my mind”, and takes in more dark roads and guilt-ridden souls than most artists can manage in whole careers.
It’s an incredibly intense album. The voice may be mostly quiet and reflective, and the guitar and occasional, sparingly-used string accompaniment plaintive and sorrowful, but it’s a record that takes the listener through some harrowing places such as the literally threatening Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell (“Don’t make me rule this home with the back of my hand”) and in Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ where Simon and Garfunkel song titles are quoted at the end of a song rejecting someone who adores the tale’s main character with the line “It ain’t Christmas time it’s Easter, Honey Bunny”.
There’s no request for pity here either. The beautiful Country Dumb (the album’s highlight so far for me, and deserving lead single at a sprightly 10 minutes, released on the 20th of February) is a matter-of-fact statement of position and outlook, and even the apparently ultra-personal Sorry With a Song asks for no more than acceptance rather than forgiveness.
This could all be utterly depressing if it wasn’t for the honesty (however true or otherwise the artist may be to the character in each song, there’s no denying the conviction) and beauty of each story’s delivery both in terms of the vocals and of the guitar-playing that embrace them. There’s also a streak of very black humour at play in places as well such as the title of Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her, which again tells a sad story but retains enough knowing to realise that the uncontrollable situation has an element of the outwardly absurd to the onlooker.
The bonus disc is a comparatively breezy affair, flying through the album’s main five songs in a mere twenty-something minutes and largely replacing the acoustic guitar of the original versions with an electric, giving each track a more urgent slant and a feel that is more in keeping with the memory I have of his live performance. There’s no lack of emotion in these briefer renditions however, and this extra is almost as essential as the main album and well worth picking up.
It’s a stunning and vaguely disturbing record, but its sincerity is its charm and the music is pure, undiluted beauty. Maybe not something to be playing in the car on a sunny day, but definitely something that will be waiting for you to come round to its blackened charms to soothe your soul, even if it has no intention of saving it. There have already been some breathtaking albums so far this year, and this is pretty much at the top of the pile.
Monday 7 February 2011
Josh T. Pearson's album Last of the Country Gentlemen named Rough Trade album of the month!
7 February 2011
Upfront import version, Rough Trade exclusive in digipack with a bonus 5 track CD featuring electric, instrumental and alternative versions of album tracks. It's worth the admission price alone. Lift to Experience were a totally loud rocking band, and, mainman Josh T. Pearson has the same intensity in his long awaited solo debut, but in a more brooding, quiet way. dealing with many similar themes, especially doubt, god and the apocalypse. His father was a 'fire and brimstone' style southern preacher and this strict religious upbringing has informed much of his musical output. This without doubt is one of the major albums of 2011. Instore and online now!
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