While you're reading this review of Blitzen Trapper's new album, released yesterday on Sub Pop Records, check out photos from the show last week at The Knitting Factory, and open up a new window to the mp3 section on The Som Show front page to hear the title track off the new record, "Destoyer of the Voice." (Photos by Rajah Bose.)
Much of the album was birthed while the band was holed up in a Portland producer's attic studio but, as the title suggests, Blitzen Trapper's "Destroyer of the Void" wasn't written in a vacuum.
Like "Furr," Blitzen Trapper's 2008 Sub-Pop Record's debut, the follow up breaks the lines bounding most things definable about Northwest indie-rock.
Nodding to "Abbey Road"-era Beatles, waving a Neil Young flag, infatuated with Queen from the opening notes of the six-minute title opener, Wilco-ish and Bob Dylanesque, "Destroyer of the Void" reaches outside the musically marked territory of the region.
The songwriting, the production, the instrumentation, everything about Blitzen Trapper -- including its sense of geography -- has grown during the last two years of nonstop touring "Furr" across the states and overseas.
And as Blitzen Trapper has raised itself from humble Pacific Northwest roots to international success, the band's anticipated fifth album -- released on yesterday on Sub-Pop Recprds -- digs deeper into its musical roots.
The album has a timeless, but non-contemporary feel, as it threads together elements of 1960s folk, '70s country and Southern rock, and '80s prog-rock and pop ballads. It's the same vintage in recording quality captured by producer Mike Coykendall, the Portland producer and studio engineer who worked on "Furr's" "Lady on the Water" and "Black River Killer," which also appeared on the 2009 EP of the same name.
There's a dark blend of psychadelic country-folk and experimental rock permeating throughout the record, without overindulging the "art" in art-rock, nor denying Blitzen's baroque-pop Portland-ness, thanks largely to chamber-rock additions of string arrangements by fellow PDXers from the band Efterkland, Peter Broderick (Horse Feathers, Norfolk and Western, Loch Lomond, Laura Gibson), and Heather Woods Borderick. There's also a lot more piano on "Destroyer."
The less accessible descents on the opening track are balanced with steadying moments of restraint, such as "The Man Who Would Speak True," built of harmonica, voice and guitar. Or "The Tree," front man Eric Earley's duet with psych-folker Alela Diane, backed mainly by acoustic guitar and light percussion.
That kind of range enables Blitzen Trapper to play both Lollapalooza and Newport Folk Festival, as it will in August.
"Destroyer of the Void" isn't a drastic departure from "Furr," rather it puts together similar aspects, only more stretched out, dissected, and ultimately refined. -Isamu Jordan, thesomshow.com
A version of this review appeared in the Spokesman-Review Newspaper.
Related links
Blitzen Trapper official web site
