Send "Blitzen Trapper " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Last year, some speculated that the sixth album by Portland’s Blitzen Trapper might see the band enter some kind of cosmic-progressive phase. The logic, such as it was, went that their Queen-inspired miniature rock opera “Destroyer of the Void” was indicative of the group’s future plans, where the last album’s other songs were not. However, borrowing from a host of ‘70s influences is just what Blitzen Trapper does. Had they chosen another song from the last album, critics might just as well have predicted the band would become full-time Laurel Canyon folkies, don leather for hard rock, or disband altogether allowing frontman Eric Earley to transform permanently into Bob Dylan. Thankfully, none of those things happened. On American Goldwing Blitzen Trapper remains true to itself—still inspired by its heroes, still fusing old sounds with new, and still compelling.A fat slice of the credit for all this is due to Earley, the man Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes once memorably called “a supergenius”. He had a point—it takes real songwriting smarts to have a little magic from CSNY or Dylan rub off on a song without it becoming too reverential. With these new tunes, Earley more easily walks that line by reining in his influences to a certain extent. Having gotten an epic like “Destroyer of the Void” out of its collective system, Blitzen Trapper is able to focus more closely on American roots music this time around. Indeed, American Goldwing is framed within a warm nostalgia for a kind of imagined, bygone America. This is a place the band has been to before, of course. They have at least edged around it in the folk narrative of a song like “The Tailor”, but here they leap in completely. From its title to its instrumentation, this is an album steeped in the hazy atmosphere of the road, one littered with rusted pickup trucks, discarded Schlitz cans, and broken hearts. This is a very specific kind of Americana, explored using both lilting country balladry as well as ragged, stomping rock. While the group’s experiments with different song styles don’t always come off—experimenting is like that—the stronger songs here can stand alongside Blitzen Trapper’s finest work to date....full text |
| Guardian |
| Blitzen Trapper's last album, Destroyer Of The Void, was the critics' crush of 2010. This swift follow-up shrugs off many of its juicier references – glam and psychedelia – and moves ever deeper into heartland Americana. The title, which refers to an overweight Honda motorcycle, is a dubious totem that joins whiskey, FM radio, small towns and harmonicas in this loving update of some very familiar terrain, where West Coast rock meets Southern roll. But despite some late-onset excitement on "Street Fighting Sun", Goldwing is just too canonical to tell us anything novel about either heartland or heart....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| Sometimes I feel like a descriptor as worn as “Bob Dylan-like” can get sapped of its prodigious qualities and left sounding almost like an insult. Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley has been nursing that tag for the better part of a decade now, and for fairly obvious reasons: his foggy croak, reclusive interviews, and winding, sometimes diverging sense of storytelling have put him in close company with Mr. Zimmerman—but in the best ways possible. Earley earns that status not out of reductive colloquialism, but out of comparable levels of talent. As such, American Goldwing might be the Dylan-est exhibit in the Blitzen catalog. It’s a centralized expression in plains-riding country and rusted Southern rock, with none of the synths or outwardly quirky freak-folk experiments—instead there’s saloon piano, languid Skynyrd guitar solos, and a dash of pedal steel. Even the title, American Goldwing, is a reference to a freeway-mulching motorbike—it’s a snapshot of Blitzen Trapper at their most giddily undisguised. It could be a troubling concept, but Earley’s songwriting can make meat-and-potatoes Blitzen just as engaging as prog-harmonium Blitzen. American Goldwing is home to some of the most immediately catchy songs they’ve produced in a career. Songs like the freewheeling, greased-down “Fletcher,” whose components are all delectably unattached, radiate an abstract joy—the kind of tie-loosened fun that comes from the simple pleasure of being in a rock ’n’ roll band, basking in the chemistry of playing with some of your best friends, and making the music you absolutely want to make. That relaxed, free-of-judgement interplay is what elevates American Goldwing. Blitzen Trapper has never been a band to pay too much heed to critics, but here it’s like a modus operandi. The title track opens with a giant blast of harmonica, the dormant duo of “Astronaut” and “Taking it Easy Too Long” are smeared in lazy pedal steel, the central riff (and name, for that matter) of “Street Fighting Sun” could’ve been plucked off an Allman Brothers jam. The record goes as far to end with a dour ballad called “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which could be taken as a poignant meditation on alienation or woe-is-me clutter depending on your current headspace....full text |
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