Thrift Store Cowboys fourth studio album Light-Fighter (out October 12) could be called their post-arson period, as Daniel Fluitt and band wrote the record after a stranger torched their gear and merchandise-filled trailer parked next to Fluitt’s bedroom, nearly taking his life. Produced by Craig Schumacher (Calexico, Neko Case, Iron and Wine) Light-Fighter is full of their trademark indie rock, laced with ambient and Gothic western music — but it is also a pinnacle record –their sound enriched by a decade of touring. The songs touch on death, loss, fear, redemption as well as the Spanish civil war and western ghost stories. All buoyed by soaring violin, draped against bottom-ended guitar and pedal steel sounds that spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone might envy.
The Lubbock sextet based sextet, which includes Fluitt, Colt Miller, Clint Miller, Cory Ames, Kris Killingsworth, and Amanda Shires on fiddle and vocals (who has a small roll in Gwyneth Paltrow’s upcoming movie Love Don’t Let Me Down), is neither of the typical Texas-based type of bands – a country-rock mélange or strictly indie rock. As Buddy Magazine points out, “Thrift Store Cowboys’ feel is more, for a lack of better description, gypsy desert music – the free sound of spacey, heat-induced delirium…It’s a sure, confident sound backed by thoughtful vision.” They last released Lay Low While Crawling or Creeping, of which Austin Sound said, “the album is to country music what Jim Jarmusch’s film Deadman was to the western.”
