The Straight Hits!

Each track here employs "straight" in the title, but Josh T. Pearson remains crooked as a bag of snakes.

This is an album--much like its predecessor--that's utterly pure of heart. The jovial uplift of those first few songs might, at first, come off as affectation, but as a metaphor for life—how the exuberance of youth and young love and ambition falters and fades into an existential black hole, giving way to work and bills and the inevitable death of everyone you know and love--it couldn't be more incisive. A welcome return.

The main take away from The Straight Hits! is that Josh T. Pearson has a lot more facets to his music than he may have previously let on.

It's not all straight A's, but that hardly seems the point. This feels like a necessary act of burning and rebuilding. [May 2018, p.33]

Pearson's point has been made: he's upended the high expectations his 2011 album set, no longer seeming like a soul-baring troubadour. Whether that was worth a seven year wait, only fans can decide.

Too often the feeling remains that the joke isn't funny enough to sustain a whole record, especially one that follows a masterpiece.

Josh T Pearson’s latest experiments have made for his most uneven record yet, but among the less characterful songs, there’s still some of that old miserable magic to relish within the directness of it all. The Straight Hits! may not be his finest, but maybe the purge was a necessary one.

This music’s unhinged, pinballing molecules have a wild energy, here and there.

The Straight Hits! feels so unlike 2011's exquisitely miserable Last Of The Country Gentlemen. Pearson wrote the LP according to five songwriting "pillars" and the constraints, paradoxically, have freed him up. [Jun 2018, p.114]

The best moments recall Dan Sartain, a man whose moustachioed fashion victim look Pearson seems to have lifted, but whose freewheeling punk rockacountrybilly essence he hasn’t quite distilled.