Gideon's Trumpet
Lift To Experience—These Are the Days (2000 / Indie Psych Rock)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re anticipating Armageddon with the “three boys from Texas”.
So, Texas is in the national news again. It’s never really the good kind of news that Texas finds itself in. No, it’s usually something dark. For instance, a certain US president and his drive past a grassy knoll.
Since 1994, Republicans have held every major state seat. Democrats take the large cities. What plays out is a microscopic version of the country’s longstanding conundrum that is the Supremacy Clause: there’s a reason political observers say that to see where the nation is headed, to watch Texas. The fight between Federal oversight v State’s rights on micro-scale. The one-two punch to civil rights currently adding to the sucking of fun out of me being back in this strange state is the Abbott—Paxton greasy-bellied slide into Margaret Atwood novel cosplay and the simping of Daddy Trump; a war on women and a war on brown people. It feels like a really wonderful time to have returned.
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It’s such a conflict being Texan. On one hand, there’s the whole mythology about how fiercely independent Texans are. Yet, on the other hand a handful of those same independent Texans want to force their will upon you, and they often do it as “Christians”. The fact that those same people have their demons, like we all do, just gets dissolved into their chaos I guess. But maybe clean up your own backyards before you come poking into mine…because this is Texas, and legally you dipshits have given us all the right to just shoot each other.
Which brings me to the music today.
It is about the conundrum. I’m not a religious man, yet I fear God’s wrath. I don’t follow the scriptures, yet I sometimes ponder Armageddon. Growing up in this place has calcified that into my bones.
So, Lift To Experience make a lot of sense to me. They were from Denton, a small north Texas college town that has always had a great psych / garage rock scene, as any small college town should. They only put out one record, a concept album about Jesus’s return to deliver his followers to Jerusalem…which just happens to actually be located in Texas. And it boasts a cover that is a tip of the hat to Houston design agency, Pen & Pixel, who defined the early 2000s southern rap music album cover aesthetic. They were led by the son of a preacher, and BBC radio tastemaker John Peel had them on his show three times.
Like numerous Texas bands, they were wholly unique and could not have come from anywhere else.
The song below is the best doorway into this strange moment where they, in their own words, were “simply the best band in the whole damn land”. This song, like the best preacher’s sermon, has gotten me through some of my most complicated moments, the strangest, most confusing times; when you feel so tiny and small and helpless, this song will literally do what their band name tells you it will, lift you to experience all that is the joy and freedom of giving it all up to God, fate, time or whatever else you give your faith to.
Lift To Experience, y’all.
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