Staff Reviews

Josh T Pearson - The Straight Hits!

Review by Nick Roseblade

This could very well be Pearson’s coming out party after years in the wilderness»

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The Straight Hits! is the brand new album from Josh T. Pearson and is Josh’s second solo album following the critically acclaimed, Rough Trade Album Of The Year, 2011’s The Last Of The Country Gentlemen. Recorded in Texas with members of Lift To Experience and The Texas Gentlemen, the album includes Straight To The Top and You Set Me Straight.

The Straight Hits! features multiple different flavours of country, rock and all points in between, taking in blasts of goofy shit-kicking country-punk (opener Straight To The Top!,); cataclysmic rock’n’roll playing its romantic drama at high-stakes (Loved Straight To Hell, which compresses the elemental power of Lift To Experience into five and a half minutes of symphonic turmoil); aching folksy mourn (Dire Straights Of Love), and even a bona fide love song, the deliciously profound ache of A Love Song (Set Me Straight), which Pearson admits breaks several of his Five Pillars, but obeys an unwritten Sixth Pillar: Musical rules are made to be broken. Written fast, the tracks were cut with similar no-nonsense focus, in three days with engineer Matt Pence (who made Mute’s 2017 reissue of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads sound so vivid) at the controls, Lift To Experience drummer Andy Young once again manning the traps, and Daniel Creamer and Scott Lee Jr. of The Texas Gentlemen on keyboards and bass guitar. The recordings were then flown to the UK to be mixed by Ben Hillier. And while the whole project was meant as a simple “exercise”, the result is some of Pearson’s finest music. Josh T. Pearson has freed himself from the mythology that has surrounded him since Lift To Experience’s implosion, his subsequent years in the wilderness travelling throughout Europe and beyond, and the release of his acclaimed debut album.