Audio By Carbonatix
Keep Westword Free
We’re $1,500 away from our spring campaign goal!
We’re aiming to raise $20,000. Your support ensures Westword can continue watching out for you and our community. No paywall. Always accessible. Daily online and weekly in print.
Rose’s Pawn Shop may forever attract cheap punchlines about the aptness of its name; after all, the group sports more instruments than the back room of a run-down secondhand shop. But a fair listen to the music should put a dead stop to any assholery. Amid the banjo, upright bass, fiddle, mandolin, bouzouki, lyra, pedal steel and accordion is a rich, riveting body of songs that balance hill-steeped rootsiness and a peripheral worldliness. Not that the Shop’s bluegrass-tinted debut, The Arsonist, will ever get confused with Gogol Bordello — though there is a similarly rousing feel to both that bridges the gap between folksy depth and ass-shaking frenzy. The Shop’s new full-length, Dancing on the Gallows, is due this summer, so expect plenty of road-testing at this 3 Kings hoedown.
