The world needs more albums like this, this rambling stream-of-consciousness wail. Well, maybe not needs; but it does the world good to have stuff like this to balance out all the hollow guff that seems to threaten to drown us in a biblical flood.
I first heard Lift to Experience on the John Peel show; I think I was at D's house at the time. I'm pretty sure it was a live recording, so that would mean it was this one. Remarkably, they then recorded another Peel session three days later, and a further one four months after that. What have they done since that burst of activity in 2001? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
I put in a request for this for Christmas that year: I think it was my parents who gave it to me.
Of course it's a double album, and of course it's hard to digest it all. Although it makes me feel guilty that I'm not more intimately familiar with the album, I console myself that it'll give me something to do in my retirement. My dad read all of Martin Gilbert's biographies of Winston Churchill in the first years after he retired. I'll spend some quality time with my Lift to Experience album and a few others that deserve closer attention.
The Cocteau Twins were culturally about as far away from Texas rawk music as it's possible to get, but they (well, two of them) were clearly pretty shrewd to spot something in the Lift to Experience sound that they could identify with, and you can hear something of that Cocteau 'shimmering' in the guitar blasts here.
 MusicBrainz entry for Disc 1Disc 2 |
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