Josh Pearson - The Straight Hits! (LP) - Pink Vinyl

Josh T. Pearson spent years being the patron saint of the slow burn, first with Lift to Experience’s cult epic The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, then with the stark, heartwrecked solo debut Last of the Country Gentlemen. The Straight Hits! flips the script. Released in April 2018 on Mute, it’s Pearson loosening his shoulders, writing fast, singing loud, and letting a Texas bar-band spirit cut through the ache. He famously set himself a set of rules for this record, a self-imposed game he called the Five Pillars, and the easiest one to clock is right there on the label: every song has the word “straight” in the title. It sounds like a gag until the needle drops and you hear how much freedom he finds inside that constraint.

You get it immediately with Straight at Me. It’s brisk, guitar-forward, closer to roadhouse rock than the whispered hymns of his past. Pearson’s voice still carries that weathered, biblical drama, but now it grins between the lines. Straight to the Top! pushes harder, a swaggering mission statement that feels built for a stage, not a confessional. There’s rhythm here, a thump in the pocket that keeps you moving even when the lyrics twist the knife. He’s always been a writer first, and the punchlines sit next to the gut punches, both landing.

What lands hardest is the sense of play. Pearson wrote quickly for this album, and you can hear the spark in the arrangements. Guitars bite and jangle, drums kick rather than sigh, and there’s a touch of honky-tonk humor that never tips into parody. It’s still the same guy who once turned heartbreak into a seven-song vigil. He just found other gears. The contrast with Last of the Country Gentlemen is striking, which is part of why critics from places like The Guardian and Pitchfork latched onto it. The story around him helps too. After Lift to Experience briefly reunited in 2016 and reissued their album through Mute, Pearson seemed to shake off a decade of mythmaking and go looking for songs that felt good to sing at volume.

That doesn’t mean the stakes are low. He’s still writing about love, faith, sin, and the long walk home. The trick is how the band dresses those themes. Riffs pop, choruses arrive on time, and the tempos refuse to mope. You can picture these tunes ricocheting around a club, maybe even drawing out a dance floor, which is not something anyone said about his debut. The Straight Hits! vinyl captures that energy with a warmth digital streams flatten. Crank it and you’ll catch small details, like the ring of a crash cymbal tucked behind a steel-kissed guitar line, or the way Pearson’s drawl turns sly on a rhyme you don’t see coming until it lands.

I’ve spun a lot of Josh T. Pearson vinyl over the years, and this one is the easiest to recommend to friends who never fell for the long-lament style. It’s approachable, but it’s not slight. The songs carry scars, they just don’t demand silence around them. If you came here from Lift to Experience, you’ll hear flashes of that grandeur reframed as barroom scripture. If you walked in via word of mouth about his first solo album, you’ll hear a songwriter taking the same themes and choosing a faster road.

As a physical object, The Straight Hits! feels right in a crate next to classic country rock and indie lifers who grew up on Doug Sahm and Dylan. If you’re browsing a Melbourne record store or sifting through vinyl records Australia listings, this is a record that rewards an impulse grab. The sleeve pops, the sequencing moves, and the whole thing begs for side flips. And if you’re hunting online, it’s easy enough to buy Josh T. Pearson records online or look for Josh T. Pearson albums on vinyl without getting lost in resellers. The Straight Hits! vinyl is still out there, and it’s worth finding a clean copy.

Pearson didn’t abandon seriousness. He just learned to grin while he tells you how it went wrong, then right, then wrong again. That’s the charm here. The songs go down fast, and then they hang around, refrains repeating in your head the way barroom wisdom does. For an artist long associated with long nights, this is a sunrise record. Not bright and shiny, but bright enough to see the road, straight ahead.