“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage.
A certain grouchy state of mind this morning almost compelled me to break my own if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice-don’t-say-anything-at-all rule for the blog and post a list of disappointing albums of 2011. Instead, though, I figured it’d be much more constructive to round up a few things worth investing in.
Sad news reaches us this morning about the death of Elizabeth Taylor, aged 79, from congestive heart failure. It's been a pretty grim year so far, with the passing of actors like Pete Postlethwaite and, last week, Michael Gough. Taylor's death, though, feels like the closing of a specific chapter in movie history.
Last month, I travelled over to Duluth, Minnesota to interview Low for the issue of Uncut that comes out later this week. While I was there, I emailed a couple of questions about the band to Nels Cline (via Wilco’s publicist), who guests on the wonderful new Low album, “C’Mon”.
