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Although Portland-based sextet Blitzen Trapper have been around since 2000, it wasn’t until their 2007 signing with Sub Pop that they started to receive real, substantial and much-deserved critical acclaim. They’d long been a Pitchfork favorite, but their 2008 release, “Furr“, a wonderfully-crafted, folky album whose title track was one of my top-played songs of the summer of 2009, earned them a two-page spread in Rolling Stone and a taste of the attention they deserved. Their 2010 follow-up, “Destroyer Of The Void,” fell a bit short of the high bar that “Furr” set, which may be why their latest, “American Goldwing” was released barely a year later.
Blitzen Trapper have always had a country-esque sound, but they seem to be dialing it up in “Goldwing,” and the first track, “Might Find It Cheap,” would sound like it belongs on GAC were it not for the well-crafted guitar riffs and emotive percussion. The second track, “Fletcher,” channels a bit more of the beloved “Furr,” especially in the lively piano and acoustic guitar, and is possibly one of the best tracks on the album.
It’s interesting to hear Blitzen Trapper’s sound maturing and changing into what seems the lovechild of Wilco and Hootie & The Blowfish raised in the deep-south. Sometimes this Americana twang doesn’t quite satisfy, with songs like “Love The Way You Walk Away” and “Your Crying Eyes” possessing barely any of the originality that Blitzen have so brilliantly demonstrated in the past.
This is all the more frustrating for the fact that Blitzen can still occasionally get it right: tracks like “Girl In A Coat” and “Taking It Easy Too Long” beautifully channel Bob Dylan, both lyrically and vocally, and hint at what the album might have been, only for the title track to bring things down again with a tentative opening and synths that couldn’t sound more out of place. Credit Blitzen Trapper for trying something different, sure, especially on an album with a few samey tracks, but an album’s title track should knock it out of the park. “American Goldwing” falls short.
Still, there are some real beauties here. Again channeling Dylan (and, oddly enough, the tiniest bit of “Wish You Were Here”-era Pink Floyd), Blitzen produce “Astronaut” and the closing track “Stranger In A Strange Land,” a lyrical wonder whose opening lines, “I’m weary from this river/that flows far but never nearer/to my home,/and the wars upon the shore/ keep the single girls indoors/and so my love songs fall on wasted ears,” demonstrate that Blitzen Trapper are still capable of producing poetry. If only they produced a little more of it on “American Goldwing”.
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