Last of the Country Gentlemen

Josh T. Pearson's Last of the Country Gentlemen is a nakedly confessional, unflinchingly honest, sometimes suffocatingly intimate album. It profiles the desperation of one who desires deliverance from tormented obsession and self-destructive behavior, yet can find neither rest nor redemption. Pearson expresses this without megalomania or self-pity. He's fronted by Texas trio Lift to Experience, who released a single album a decade ago, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, which married the beautiful, overdriven sonics of My Bloody Valentine to Americana with Biblical-scale spiritual visions. But Pearson's lived hard and wild in the ensuing decade. Last of the Country Gentlemen reveals that he still believes in his God, but he's been also torn apart by love, drink, and a past he cannot reconcile, but which he accepts full responsibility for. Recorded over two nights in Berlin, the disc contains seven songs -- four over ten minutes long -- usually skeletally adorned by his voice and elliptica