Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Just As Was Told
2. Down Came The Angels
3. Falling From Cloud 9
4. With Crippled Wings
5. Waiting To Hit
6. Ground So Soft

Disc 2:

1. These Are The Days
2. When We Shall Touch
3. Down With The Prophets
4. To Guard And To Guide You
5. Into The Storm

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4290 in Music
• Released on: 2002-11-25
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Double CD

Amazon.co.uk Review
On the cover of their wryly titled debut album The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, Texan trio Lift To Experience look, initially, like a standard-issue alternative country act: they're wearing big hats and embroidered shirts and slightly faraway stares, looking for all the world like they've just survived a pillaging of their wagon train out on the road to El Paso. However, it takes only a couple of tracks for Lift To Experience to suggest that there is much more going on here. These are country songs only in terms of their spirit of place and unswerving holy righteousness. The music that contains them is a heady, freewheeling guitar trip heavily influenced by such definitively modern, and definitively British, acts as Cocteau Twins and (especially) My Bloody Valentine. Singer Josh Pearson's fluttering treble has doubtless already earned him more comparisons to Jeff Buckley than he knows what to do with, but to criticise him on that score would be similar for damning a young footballer for playing like Pele. Wherever Lift To Experience are going, they'll be worth following. --Andrew Mueller

Uncut, July 2001
"..When the amps are turned off, there’s stunned silence. We’ve just witnessed something truly unique."

Q May, 2001
"Beautiful, mysterious and unique"

Customer Reviews

"Prayer Guided Melodies", or How I Learned to Love the Rock
One listen to disc 2 of Texas Jerusalem Crossroads will leave you stunned, wondering what influences and upbringings brought about this genius band. Lyrically, LTE are all about.. religious revelations (it's the apocalypse and Texas is the promised land) and hidden messages. They are bringing the message to Europe in April and May in anticipation of their debut album's release.

Lift to Experience and centro-matic are wave 2 of the Texas Invasion that brought you And You Will Know Them by the Trail of Dead, Spoon, and At the Drive In last year. While Lift to Experience sound more like Spiritualized than their Texas neighbors, these bands share a common theme of intensity that is unrivaled.

This double album will leave you staring into space wondering where these boys get off telling YOU about the promised land.

If singer/guitarist Josh Pearson's deluded charismatic rantings are to believed, Texas is, literally, the reason.

The apocalypse has come and a rock music Tsunami crashes out of Texas!
"Is the world really ready for a 75-minute progressive country-emo concept album by three God-fearing ranch hands about Texas being the Promised Land?" asked NME on the release of this album in 2001. The answer unfortunately was a resounding no, since Josh Pearson's masterwork has been largely ignored or at best comes up in those rather sad "great lost album" polls.

In honesty everything about the album sounds wrong and completely over the top. It is littered with biblical references throughout (songs with titles like Down with the Prophets and "Grounds so soft" is based on 1st Corinthians). Half the songs exceed 10 minutes and Josh Pearson and the crew on the album's cover look like they should be selling snakebite or fleecing the sick. Pearson is about 7 feet tall and his height is as large as his ambition. Then there is the central plot with Texas emerging from some apocalypse as a geographical "Noah's arks" with its epicentre in the town of Denton. Do I hear the call for a straightjacket? I know it sounds like pseuds corner and should be an utter disaster, but isn't, its sheer brilliance!

Two cds can barely contain the scope and scale of this and on times it feels as big and awe inspiring as the lone star state itself. References I suppose are a mix of My Bloody Valentine, Explosions in the Sky but sound tracked to a voice so soft that the ghost of Jeff Buckley is invoked.

I don't want to create the impression that this album is somehow the heavy rock soundtrack for the Christian right. Pearson songs are full of humour and utterly preposterous. Thus he pleads at one time "Lord, I'll make you a deal: I will if you give me a smash hit so I can build a city on the hill". Similarly it blows you away with the sheer force and power of the music. "Falling from cloud 9" could easily just disintegrate but is holds to together to produce a huge blast of epic proportions. You feel on times that it will blow you away and that 20 guitars are playing. "These are the days" has a fantastic rumbling bass and Pearson planting a smashing kiss on the microphone. While "Into the storm" is massively religious but in hallucinatory visionary way. It is difficult to encapsulate the ambition poured into TTJC, you just need to hear it. There are in addition some storming Peel Sessions you should search for.

The album has never been repeated and Josh T Pearson tours occasionally as a country singer looking like a mountain man on speed. The band as far as I am aware split and there is no sign of the album being followed up. Ultimately it doesn't need to be since its uniqueness and insanity is to be treasured.

Hallelujah!
Even the devout atheist will come away from this album with a desire to witness the apocalypse, if not instigate it. I first came across LTE at Leeds festival last year: I entered the tiny tent in which they were playing to be greeted by the blast of "Falling from Cloud 9". It is not often that one feels something akin to revelation when hearing music: only something special can do that.
"WHen America Falls the World will fall with her" - Listening to that in the aftermath of 9/11 only increases the significance of the this album. Redemption comes in the form of Texas boys in cowboy hats - praise the lord.