When Bat For Lashes was still a relatively undiscovered secret, a friend and I went to see a gig of hers at a church in Brighton. It was a beautiful evening and she was supported by a member of her band at the time, Ginger Lee, and by this gentleman, who also featured on the Bat For Lashes track ‘Trophy’. After Mr. Pearson stood on top of the altar of St. George’s singing ‘Silent Night’ acapella, the silence that ensued would have made a pin drop deafening. And from then, I discovered Lift To Experience’s ‘Texas Jerusalem Crossroads’, then, when I met the man himself in December 2009, he told me he would be putting out a “country record” soon and I got very excited, but, at the same time, didn’t really think it would ever show up, as it had already been about 8 years since his last output. Thank goodness my doubts were unfounded!
The closest record I can compare Pearson’s debut to in terms of structure is Joanna Newsom’s ‘Ys’ – ‘Last of the Country Gentlemen’ spans seven tracks but, with four of them over ten minutes, lasts either just under or just over an hour (depending on whether you have the bonus title track, available on the vinyl and the iTunes versions of the album) and truly takes you on a journey.
The record opens with a slight drone and Pearson’s strong-yet-delicate voice (not completely unlike the deep tones of Mark Lanegan) accompanying the comforting backdrop of constant finger-picked acoustic guitar. “I’m off to save the world,” he sings from a reverberant-rich well of sound in ‘Thou Art Loosed’, and you imagine, in a world where the pop-charts are designed to be played from a cellphone, he just may succeed. This is the easiest track to listen to on the album, merely due to its short length; apart from the final song, the rest of the pieces on this album are lengthy, mostly consisting of just guitar and voice, with the odd violin accompaniment. The songs don’t always seem to follow a particular structure, and indeed most are too long to do so. Instead, Pearson wanders from passage to passage, touching on religious connotations (as well as Simon and Garfunkel references!) in ‘Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ’. It is almost as if he sat down in front of a microphone and literally played his heart out. His voice whispers and soars, drawls with restraint, drifts away and comes right to the fore, all the while accompanied by idiosyncratic guitar accompaniment, sometimes slight, sometimes precocious. Almost halfway into ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’, something amazing happens. A completely unexpected violin bridge enters and when Pearson sings above it, you get the sense he is trying to force the tears from your eyes, such is the considered beauty of the piece. The beauty is not in the catharsis the song title would suggest, but actually from the change of tone the strings provide, converting a song about devotion momentarily into a state of contentment, before the chord changes become slighter and sadder, and eventually Pearson whispers his way to the outro.
The halfway point of the album is the mammoth 13-minute epic ‘Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her’ – which incidentally is almost guaranteed to win my Song-Title-of-the-Year contest come December. In this song, Pearson is "in love with an amazing woman, it’s just that she is not my wife". The music in the song plays the role (in my mind, anyway!) of the background music in a film where a drunken wretch at the bar pours out his woes of his love to a sympathetic listener. The tragic narrative where Pearson describes the woman’s reply, saying that "she wishes she was her" in reference to the singer’s wife, is incredibly heart-rending, and makes us, the listener, feel nothing but complete sympathy for this couple unable to express their mutual love, and particularly for Pearson’s agony at knowing what he is feeling is completely wrong. A special moment.
‘Sorry With A Song’ ebbs and flows; Pearson speaks and sings with the same pattern as the guitar in places, leaving little gaps where the final cadence of a phrase will be left to ring out. As the song goes on listing Pearson’s faults, he varies the ways in which he fills in these gaps. This song, which should by all rights be very repetitive, is saved from being so by these little twists in performance, which begin to refer to each other: the speeding up of syllables, the repetition of tiny phrases, the introduction of little guitar phrases built up against the main chord sequence. Next, the album version of ‘Country Dumb’ (there is a single version as well) starts with Pearson accompanying himself with an embellished version of the vocal melody with his guitar, before the violin returns to join, and then replace him in this setup. This really emphasises the melody of the song, which hasn’t really happened before on this album, and as a consequence, it actually detracts from the emotional impact of the lyrics a little, as the listener’s ear has something to easily hook onto. This song also gets quite busy between about 6 and 7 minutes in, followed by an almost acapella section, it really is quite amazing to witness the range of sound available with so little instrumentation.
The final track, ‘Drive Her Out’ is the shortest on the album and features the reverb effects of the first track again, as well as some background piano and multiple vocal tracks. It is as simplistic as the first track and suddenly ends, with neither a dramatic closing flourish or a long sustained note, nor a fade-out. It just stops and waits for you to notice the absence of sound.
Overall then, this album is really quite unique. Yes, it has elements of Ryan Adams’ ‘29’ album, and of Jeff Buckley and that whole vibe (which is generally attributed to Bon Iver’s ‘For Emma…’) of one man locked away putting all his heartbreak and demons onto record, but the end result is truly individual. The religious connotations, absurd song lengths, and skeletal accompaniment available on the album should not make for such good and easy, if introspective and cathartic, listening. What I really love about ‘Last of the Country Gentlemen’ is that Josh T. Pearson, in this world of Mumford and Sons and Noah and the Whale, does not care one iota about making his brand of acoustic music in the slightest bit palatable to the masses and consequently has made the most impressive album of its kind around. The quality of this man cannot be overstated – I have seen him live and can give testament to both his vocal and guitar-playing skills. Yet he doesn’t go all-out virtuoso on his debut, but merely does what is right for these singular compositions, fitting them with truly engaging performances. If I were to find fault with the album, I could only suggest that maybe it could be fleshed out with more musical ideas as opposed to the variations employed in Pearson’s delivery. But in doing so, I think this would tarnish some of the magic of this album.
A high mark for this album then. At the same time though, I’m well aware that it won’t be everybody’s glass of single-malt.
94
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