Reviewing this album is going to be a little tricky (yes, I know, I always say that).  Because Matt from Stay Loose, who are doing the UK PR for the album, knew I would like this he got a copy to me really quickly, so I first heard it before any of the swathes upon swathes of messianically-toned reviews were published.  This is a bloody good thing, because after all the fawning press, I think I might have found it hard not to be deliberately contrarian, had I not already known it was a stunning album.

It is not by any means, in my opinion at least, for everyone.  The critical world may be awash with love for Last of the Country Gentlemen, but I can imagine it turning a lot of people off.  I have a couple of reasons for that, and they are as follows:

Firstly, the album is intimidatingly intense from an emotional perspective.  It is so naked, so confessional, so tortured, that just being able to absorb the force of it takes some doing.  If you are not able or inclined to do so, then I can easily imagine it becoming a bit wearing, and you might just glaze over entirely.

Secondly, the actual arrangements are pretty minimal, and in songs which depend heavily on repeated, rolling refrains, and quarter of a hour’s worth of intense, confessional narrative, I can easily see people who are not captivated by this record finding it to be over-wrought and, ultimately, boring.  When you write an album this personal, though, I think this is the kind of risk you must know you are taking, as an artist.

For the rest of us, well I have to agree with what seems like ninety-nine percent of the British music press: this is fucking stunning.  Essentially it is a document of a particularly rough period of Pearson’s life – as he says, “I write what’s in front of me” – and is unflinchingly* uncensored to the point where you almost have to engage with it, or else you simply can’t share the same space.  The quietness of the music has a similar effect: you either hush up and listen intently to every vanishing syllable and every finger barely brushing a guitar string, or there is simply no point bothering.

Live, this effect is particularly noticeable.  I have never in my life heard such blanket silence at gigs as when I have seen Pearson play, first at the Muzzle of Bees Backyard Barbecue in Austin and then last week at Stereo in Glasgow.  It’s simply impossible to give this album anything other than your full attention.  The sparse beauty of the music demands it to begin with, but to treat such unguarded confessions with anything less would seem like the height of crassness.

There are few vestiges of Pearson’s previous band, the ten-years-dead Lift to Experience, here.  Surprisingly short opener, the three-and-a-bit minute I am Loosed, is possibly the closest you’ll get.  There is also a certain grandiosity in the idea of a fifteen minute acoustic lament, and these make up the bulk of this record, and in doing so perhaps hint at a similar underlying aesthetic to The Texas-Jersusalem Crossroads.  “Commerce versus art, commerce versus art”, as he might put it.

There is little else to say here, really.  This record is utterly brutal, and yet utterly beautiful.  The music itself is no more than quiet acoustic guitar, building from the barest touch to a brief swells of strumming as the song rises an falls.  Warren Ellis’s fiddle makes an appearance here and there, but it too is beautifully understated.  It is what it is, and a lot of people will simply find the barriers too great to really enjoy a record this burning with unhappiness, self-recrimination and heartbreak.

For everyone else, though, Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the most special, affecting, horrible, beautiful albums you will hear for fucking years.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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Josh T. Pearson – Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell

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* I wonder how often the term ‘unflinching’ has been used in reviews of this record!