Reviews

Being the former frontman of a band who made music arguably so breathtaking it made you want to convert to Christianity within the space of three chords, this is a man who knows what he is talking about.

And you can't help but feel a bit sorry for his reduced status in the world. Only seven years before, his former band, Lift To Experience, were packing the Roadhouse to its very limits and making its walls sweat with whiskey honed tales of Texas being the promised land.

Josh T Pearson

Now he returns to Manchester to play Jabez Clegg, a venue where, in his lonesome and penniless cowboy garb, he stands out like a sore thumb and which honours his presence with making him compete with a quid-a-drink drum and bass night.

Perhaps on this basis alone, it's not surprising that when he opens his mouth to sing, he comes across as a very angry man. With Lift to Experience, his bandmates smoothed away all of his rough edges; now, his solo songs are like shards of broken glass, agonising tortuous soul searching efforts all peppered with the kind of religious imagery one would perhaps expect from the son of a preacher man.

Songs with titles such as Sins Of The Father and Banished - introduced as a ten minute “smash hit” - are not such much musical tales of abandonment as lupine howls into the night; noisy, raw and furious with God, man and the world.

Then again, perhaps playing to 40 people in a bar in the back-end of town on a Thursday night is the Texan way of doing things. There certainly is a dark, laconic beauty to Mr Pearson that can't quite be snuffed out by his surroundings.

And by the time he shuffles off stage with no more ceremony than a simple gospel finale, you can't help thinking that this is one lone star of the lone star state that isn't burnt out just yet.