The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads

In 2001 Lift To Experience released their debut album “The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads”. It’s playing as I write this. I read a review of the album in some magazine. It was album of the week or month but was filled with superlatives about the album.

It turned out this was their only album. They had released an EP in 1997 and the guitarist and singer released a solo album “Last Of The Country Gentlemen” in 2011 which was more acoustic but in a similar universe to “The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads”. There is another album "THe Straight Hits" released in 2018

Lift To Experience - Live

I did see the band in a small room in Newcastle University and Josh T Pearson was wearing a T Shirt that said: “My State Is Bigger Than Your Country”. We spoke for a while but it was so long ago that I have forgotten what was said but it was all good.

Lift To Experience - “The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads” - The Disc

In 2017 a fifteenth-anniversary copy of the album was released and is an absolutely stunning package which you can see in this article that I wrote on CD packaging. I also have a few pictures of what this looks like.

Lift To Experience - “The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads” - The Music

Now to the matter in hand, this is like nothing you have ever heard or will hear again. The rhythm section of drummer Andy "The Boy" Young and bassist Josh "The Bear" Browning provides a bedrock from the whole album while Josh T Pearson carves out stunning soundscapes on the guitar with singng that is almost hymnal and evangelical taking you into some alternate universe at the end of days.

I found a review of the album on the PopMatters site here which goes thus:

There is no way to begin a review of this challenging album without quoting this telling opening passage from “Just As Was Told” the opening song of the first album.

‘This is the story of three Texas boys mindin’ their own bidnis when the Angel of the Lord appeared unto them saying, ‘When the Winston Churchill's start firin’ their Winston rifles into the sky from the lone star state, drinkin’ their lone star beer and smokin’ their winston cigarettes, know the time is drawin’ nigh when the son shall be lifted on high’. We told ’em that didn’t sound very Sunday-go-ta-meetin. ‘What do you expect when the lord calls on the crippled, deaf and blind to lead the children of Israel into the promised land’. ‘Children of Israel?’, we asked. ‘Don’t you boys know nothin’?, the USA is the center of Jer-usa-lem”‘.

This is an example of what you are getting into.

There are two forty-minute albums but the second contains fourteen minutes of silence before the final hidden song which is part of “Into The Storm” which therefore clocks in at nearly half an hour rather than the impressive ten minutes that it is clocked at.

The thing is this is an experience, there is rock instrumentation and the soundscapes slip into songs. “These are the Days” which opens the second album was issued as a single but it probably didn’t trouble any charts.

You can’t dance to it, you have to sink into it and immerse yourself into it, which is unusual for an album that uses such a traditional instrumental setup.

There are lots of biblical references and I don’t know if the band is religious but it does transport you into some almost post-apocalyptic world referring to Texas, Jerusalem, the children of Israel and Winston Churchill, Angels, and Stars.

You may think that I really have lost it in telling you about this, but it is playing now and taking me to places I would never go alone,

I will lead you in with “Falling From Cloud 9” which is almost a song. Many will not like this. You cannot dance to it but it will take you to incredible places if you fall into it.