Maybe we owe it to the pandemic or to our troubled times or just to flat-out maturity that we see so many bands reuniting in 2022. Last week we covered The Great Divide, and now we have the reunited Rose’s Pawn Shop with their first release since 2014’s Gravity Well, with all core members in tow. Before going further, a word on the name sounds more like a song than a band name. It owes to frontman Paul Givant’s ex-girlfriend Rose, who had quite a raging reaction to the couple’s breakup by stealing the band’s equipment and pawning it across Los Angeles. That incident alone would be difficult to recover from, but the group is resilient and that is the major theme of the hopeful Punch-Drunk Life. While the previous effort was dark, this one rings with more positivity, a reflection of Givant’s marriage and relationships with family and friends.
The band has refined its signature mix of bluegrass instrumentation with roots-rock flourishes. The six-piece unit features principal songwriter Paul Givant, guitarist/producer Zachary Ross, upright bassist Stephen Andrews, drummer Matt Lesser, and multi-instrumentalists Tim Weed and John Kraus. Opening with the boxing analogy, “Old Time Pugilist,” the theme of resilience is the clear immediate focus with the lyric – “I can’t count every blow that knocked me down and the referees looking to see if I’m surrendering. But I’m climbing up the ropes I’m still contending in this ring.” One of already three released singles follows with “Ghost Town,” about facing a crossroads, grappling with the loss of a shattered relationship, and building the inner resolve to start anew. The song is also symbolic of the kind of small towns and isolated places where the band often plays.
The other singles are “Gratitude” and “Better Now.” The soaring harmony of the former meshes with the nimble picking to celebrate the life of a departed loved one while the latter was written after Givant’s return home from an epic tour through Alaska and Canada during which he’d been missing the woman who would later become his wife. It also carries a celebratory vibe, the kind of melody you want to sing along with on a joyous car ride.
The band’s bluegrass roots are on vivid display in the banjo-driven, kinetic “Fugitive” and the fiddle-imbued “Miss Tennessee.” The stomping “Boomerang” changes the timbre a bit, but those consistent high harmonies remain, segueing into the upbeat “The Lonely One,” with its indelible chorus “Baby, I ain’t built that way,” the melody gliding ever so smoothly over guitars and mandolin. The high-octane “High Lonesome” and the twangy “Halfway Down the Road” paint cinematic images of the out-of-the-way places where the band tours or visits along the way. “Satellite” soars over scintillating picking and the closer, “Life by Misadventure” has the most infectious hooks on the album, Givant singing gleefully about what lies ahead, no matter a few bumps in the road.
Rose’s Pawn Shop has harnessed the crucial elements of their sound – deft picking, smooth harmonies, and terrific songwriting to arrive at this uplifting effort, one of the more joyous recordings in recent memory.
