Send "Blitzen Trapper " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Blitzen Trapper's sixth album is named for a touring motorcycle meant for long hauls down endless highways, not short joy rides or joyless commutes. The Portland band means to create music that evokes the wind blowing your hair back, the miles falling away behind you, and quite possibly bugs getting stuck in your teeth. Frontman Eric Earley has explained that the album was inspired by the "inescapable past" and the eternal call of the open road-- the latter a specifically American idea that is almost necessarily soundtracked with American music.To their considerable credit, Blitzen Trapper eschew the spray-on grit of contemporaries like Dawes, Deer Tick, or Dr. Dog. Instead, they embrace a broad definition of Americana that covers the Dead, Kiss, and Pavement. In the past they've shown little hesitation mixing and matching rambling, country-rock melodies against heavy-rock riffs and slack-rock rhythms, creating an anything-goes sound that seemed obstinately determined no to close off any musical avenue, but to roll down every street. Their early albums, up to and including Wild Mountain Nation, sounded both lively and studious, fresh and familiar. After signing with Sub Pop, however, Blitzen Trapper have been whittling all of those possibilities down to a not-so-sharp point. Goldwing rides the same familiar roads we've been down so many times before, yet even a decade into their career, Blitzen Trapper sound less like denizens of the road than tourists snapping pictures of rock-historical monuments. After a brief but promising burst of squealing distortion, "Fletcher" settles into a genial ramble, sketching out a hitchhiking character "drinking whiskey from a jar through his teeth" and randomly shooting pistols for fun. These are concrete details, but never pertain to anyone found on the actual road. Instead, the title character comes across as an over-romanticized archetype, a stand-in for the band's infatuation with the America of classic rock rather than the America of 2011. That impression is only reinforced by the ramshackle sound, which is cribbed almost wholesale from the Band-- not from their Big Pink days, but from their less fruitful California period....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 |
| 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. While “Taking It Easy Too Long” is a disappointment—a mournful country tale too arch and familiar to work—something like “Love the Way You Walk Away” is much more representative of the quality here. Not unwisely given away as a free teaser MP3, it builds woozy guitar and harmonica around Earley’s story of inattentive love and is perhaps the best achievement of this record’s softer side. Elsewhere, “Street Fighting Sun” is one of the most irresistible rockers Trapper has yet recorded; as drums beat an uncommonly raucous vocal out of Earley, someone brandishes about a great dirty guitar riff and makes like he means to use it. As far as best moments go, a guitar break which briefly brings to mind Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi wrestles with Earley’s squealed realisation that “the sun, it ain’t so easy to kill.”...full text |
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