Lift to Experience's Southern Gothic Foreboding

There's a great moment in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves' character is battling with the seemingly invincible Agent Smith. Smith holds Reeves against a subway track as an engine rumbles around the bend and says, "Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability."

So put yourself in Keanu's place, only without the burgeoning superpowers that allow you to leap away from oncoming oblivion. Just you, mere mortal, held in a vise-grip with the train's headlight growing larger in your mind like a white revelation. That's what listening to the Denton, TX, space-rock band Lift to Experience is like. Bandleader and songwriter Josh Pearson puts you in the middle of the end times when the Apocalypse is bearing down, the Judgment of God is at hand and the Almighty has chosen this band to bring His children into the Promised Land.

Lift to Experience's debut on Bella Union is a two-CD concept album called The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. The opening track, "Just As Was Told," starts with a bit of absent-minded strumming and then the rhythm section explodes into the room, underscoring Pearson's detached narration: "This is the story of three Texas boys, busy minding their own business when the Angel of the Lord appeared to them..."

Those boys are, of course, the three members of Lift to Experience: Pearson, bassist Josh Browning and drummer Andy Young. The message of redemption that the reluctant trio is charged with bringing to the world bears more than a passing resemblance to the Christian gospel of Pearson's Pentecostal upbringing. Over the course of the album his stoic voice, almost uncomfortably high in the mix, steers you through the ruins of the 20th century like Virgil guiding Dante through hell. Scraps of history and music blow by while Pearson and the listener bob gently above the flotsam. The sense of vertigo is enough to make you giddy. The world below is indeed ending, and Grace has snatched you by the nape of the neck at the last second.

Like Bowie did with Ziggy Stardust, Pearson seems to be working out the notion of rock 'n' roll-as-salvation by creating a character that is part fiction, part wish fulfillment; caught between a rock star fantasy and deep Christian convictions?convictions in which ego and ambition must yield to God's calling. In the cosmos of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, one can be both Elvis and Billy Sunday. "Waiting to Hit" describes a slightly inverted Faustian bargain: "Just a stupid ranch hand in a Texas rock band/Trying to understand God's master plan/When the Lord said, 'SON! Tell the world before it explodes/The glory of the Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads'/And I said, 'Lord, I'll make you a deal/I will if you give me a smash hit/So I can build a city on a hill'/And He said, 'SON! I will if you will'/And I said, 'My Sweet Lord, it's a deal.'"

Musically, Lift to Experience takes the conventions of space-rock and shoegazing from Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine and breaks them in half. In place of the smooth, anesthetizing curves of Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads uses jagged arrangements that veer between delicate arpeggios and bracing eruptions of noise. Pearson's voice is direct and prophetic, the message delivered as assuredly as an oracle's proclamation. Word and sound here work together to astonishing effect. In "The Ground So Soft," cymbal washes and swirling guitars follow a wandering hymn-like melody that is hypnotic and worshipful: "Lord rescue me, put your hand underneath my wings/Lift me up above the raging sea and carry me to your shore."

Pearson's lone Fender Jaguar expands into an orchestra across the aural spectrum. The sounds move around and inside your head, spiraling and shattering into a thousand glittering pieces, only to reconstitute themselves in slow motion for another go-round. But this is not music to take drugs or daydream to. This is music to repent to, music to write one's will by. The last bars of "The Ground So Soft" dissolve and sink into a deathly dissonance after which Pearson breaks into a cappella four-part harmony singing the lyric "death where is thy sting?"

Is the world ready for this album? Probably not. Predictably, it is the British who have first embraced this Texas band, who owe more to Richard Ashcroft and Bono than Townes Van Zandt or Stevie Ray Vaughan. Pearson's imaginative vision of divine wrath and salvation is both harrowing and gorgeous, which, I suppose, is as it should be. Like Hazel Motes in a lost episode of The Twilight Zone, he traverses a world that is both alien and familiar, full of Southern Gothic foreboding and symphonic majesty.