Josh T Pearson: Last of the Country Gentlemen - review

Best known for Lift to Experience's 2001 cult classic The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads – which, just before 9/11, prophesied the end of the world – Josh T Pearson has spent the following decade losing his faith and his mind in Tehuacana, Texas, and spending months in bed. Somehow, he found time to pen a handful of songs documenting – but, of course – the collapse of a brief, ill-fated marriage. Those songs – with titles such as Sweetheart, I Ain't Your Christ – are as troubled as you'd expect, with the preacher's son conjuring clouds of intensity from mostly just plucked guitar and his ravaged Jeff Buckley of a vocal. The violin-assisted Woman, When I Raise Hell sounds like a brilliant, disturbed relation of Bruce Springsteen's haunted Nebraska, although elsewhere, 13-minute trawls through Pearson's innermost feelings and failings, with lines such as "I'm in love with an amazing woman, she just is not my wife", make for uncomfortable listening.