In the early 2000s, Lift to Experience burst out of the Denton, Texas, scene with The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, a mind-bogglingly ambitious double LP about the metaphysical juncture between the Lone Star State and the Middle East. Amid all the praise for the spiraling guitars and heady lyrical mythologies, the band quietly dissolved, as if it had already said everything it needed to say. Frontman Josh T. Pearson disappeared for several years, then emerged in Germany playing intimate, barely scripted shows that blended American Primitive guitar playing (think John Fahey) with quasi-Biblical lyrics (think Wovenhand). His music had grown quieter and more ruminative, eventually winning such fans as Dirty Three and Natasha Khan, who corralled him to play and sing on Bat for Lashes' Fur and Gold.
Like a slasher villain knocking off teens on the anniversary of his death, Pearson is releasing his solo debut almost 10 years after Lift to Experience's sole album release. Somewhat self-aggrandizingly titled Last of the Country Gentlemen, it was recorded in just two nights in Berlin, with Pearson doing live takes to the capture the wooly extemporaneity of his live shows. In fact, the album's most intriguing quality may be the strong impression that tracks like "Country Dumb" and "Sorry With a Song" are never the same from one performance to the next. These recordings capture fleeting moments in the lives of the songs, no more definitive than any other versions, and that gives the album a weird, stars-barely-aligned precariousness.
That unrehearsed quality relies more on Pearson's guitar playing than on his singing or songwriting. A dexterous picker, he accompanies himself loosely, unleashing a flurry of notes on opener "Thou Art Loosed" or roughly alluding to a melody on "Woman, When I've Raised Hell". There's an intriguing friction between his playing and his singing, as the tempos and dynamics change abruptly to generate an undercurrent of uneasiness. On the other hand, Pearson sounds like he's just making it all up as he goes along-- as if he has no other mission beyond the present moment. So he rambles and drones, drawing songs out beyond the 10-minute mark for no discernible reason and indulging humorless lyrical conceits. With its antiquated postcard title and hangdog self-seriousness, "Honeymoon's Great! Wish You Were Her" staggers around for 13 minutes, while "Sweetheart I Ain't Your Christ" collapses under the weight of its stilted language: "I ain't your savior or your Christ or your goddamn sacrifice," he sings. "And when I said I'd give my life, I weren't talking suicide." Pearson keeps going and going, treating your attention like a given instead a gift.
And that's the crucial flaw on this high-minded album. With that peekaboo album cover, Old West font, marathon song lengths, studiously old-time lyrics, gravely whispered expletives, and oppressive gravity, Pearson projects a threadbare sense of the "old weird America" too strongly, too persuasively. Lift to Experience at least had the loud guitars and thundering rhythm section to prop up its top-heavy concepts, but armed with only an acoustic guitar and occasional strings, Pearson places his pretensions right in the foreground. He's performing a persona rather than embodying it naturally, but no matter how many "goddamn"s he drawls or how many "thou"s and "ain't"s he drops, there's nothing truly transgressive or illuminating or innovative about Last of the Country Gentlemen. At heart, it's just a dawdling folk record that's far too enamored with its own put-ons and far too disregarding of its listener.
