It seems no matter how deep I dig (and boy, do I dig deep sometimes), there’s always some seminal release I’ve missed—even in the exact scenes I’ve been trudging through. Take for example Lift to Experience, whom I had never heard of before a review referred to my own band as “We have Lift to Experience at home” (a favorable comparison, I hope).

I’m constantly fascinated by the points of reference other people have when they hear us, so I checked out this band that we were purportedly ripping off. Truth be told, it seems like the only immediate comparison is our shared devotion to overdriven guitars and reverb pedals. But when I divorced them from the comparison, I found a wonderfully idiosyncratic record that lands directly in that sweet spot between shoegaze and post rock that I love so much—bad hip hop parody artwork aside.

A lot of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads sounds familiar. Guitarist/vocalist Josh T. Pearson runs his Fender Jazzmaster through a liberal amount of delay and reverb pedals, his snaky guitar lines stretching over extended song structures that make great use of dynamic shifts. Songs often collapse into ambient washes of noise. However, what sets Lift to Experience aside from so many of their peers is the place that Pearson’s vocals have in the music.

In most post rock and shoegaze, vocals are treated as secondary. The bands that aren’t wholly instrumental often bury the voices deep in the mix and obscure them with studio effects. Lyrics, when they exist, lean toward the abstract. On this record however, the vocals are dead center as Pearson serves as a stream-of-conscious narrator for a tale of Christ’s Second Coming into the heart of Texas. He delivers his vocals through spoken word, slacker-rock drawl, and multitracked gospel choir harmonies. He often takes cues from outlaw country, having conversations with angels or the Lord Almighty Himself with sardonic irreverence. Other times, he takes aim at the wicked and faithless with the set-jaw conviction of an Old Testament Prophet. In others, he is enrapt in the transcendent bliss of religious ecstasy as the New Jerusalem descends into the Texas landscape. Parts of it feel a little uncomfortable given current events in Gaza and the way many of these archetypes have been misappropriated by evangelical doomsday cults, but Lift to Experience doesn’t take any of it too seriously, and the irony is thick enough that no one should get confused about their motives.

It takes a little time to adjust to the sonic vocabulary of the record, but once you do, there’s plenty of gold to uncover here. The opening quartet gives a pretty good example of the range of moods. “Just As Was Told” puts mercurial dynamic shifts underneath the spoken-word opening scene. “Down Came the Angels” is serene and sublime, ambient guitars accompanying a gentle melody with the occasional cymbal wash. “Falling from Cloud 9” is as close to a proper rock song as they get, a huge space rock riff punctuating quieter verses. The next track, “With Crippled Wings,” combines all of these moods into one single ten-minute opus.

The rest of the record operates largely between the extremes of these tracks, barring the fiddle-aided acoustic “Down With the Prophets.” The sole single, “These Are the Days,” offers an acrobatic riff that’s almost Midwest emo before leaping back into the sky and burning up into noise on reentry. By the time the ten minute finale “Into the Storm” fades into the extended scraped-chord crescendo of the hidden track, the sonic world Lift to Experience builds seems quite divine indeed.