Thrift Store Cowboys - Lay Low While Crawling or Creeping

The desolate plains of the West Texas landscape has been responsible for a certain unique desperation to produce music in its residents. Whether that be Buddy Holly, The Flatlanders or Terry Allen. The land that breeds tumbleweeds, cotton and redneck Red Raiders also sprouts a band of rare cerebral depth combined with salt-of-the-earth genuineness. Lubbock's Thrift Store Cowboys are that band, as comfortable in an indie club as a honky-tonk, edgy yet traditional.

Call it experimental country. Take the band's Dirtied Your Knees, off their latest album, Lay Low While Crawling or Creeping, which kicks off with a drone-y banjo hum underlying the minimal plucking of another banjo. The effect is something like an orchestra warming up, until the tune eases its way into a rootsy midtempo rocker. Sidewalk Song, meantime, evokes Mazzy Star as much as Merle Haggard, with its slow 3/4 time, luscious fiddle and high-gain, delayed guitar - further proof that there's more to Lubbock than dust devils and Bobby Knight. ~ Dallas Observer

• Beneath the Shoes
• Understudy
• Dirtied Your Knees
• Wasted Void
• Fallen Pinetree
• Sidewalk Song
• Interlude
• Lubbock Lights
• Go! Go! You Coyotes!
• In the Clear
• Defender and Ironbelly
• Shadow Weather