Destroyer of the Void

And lo, the Portland conveyor belt of a music scene continued to churn out names to be seen to be dropping: The Decemberists, M Ward, Musée Mécanique. But Blitzen Trapper are no new fangled next-big-thing; they released their first LP in 2003, and this, Destroyer Of The Void, is their fifth in total.

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Who’s your favorite ‘70s band? Odds are, Blitzen Trapper sound like them. It’s hard not to play “guess the influences” with this Portland, Oregon sextet. From track to track, singer/guitarist Eric Early and company bounce from folk rock to prog, psychedelic pop to southern rock without breaking a sweat, paying homage to their forefathers without ever ripping them off.

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Cheers to Portland's Blitzen Trapper for opening their fifth full-length, Destroyer of the Void, with the album's almost proggy title track. "Destroyer of the Void" ambitiously steamrolls over decades of canonical popular music, squishing it into an epic suite that gathers Beatles harmonies, sci-fi synths, classic rock guitars, country-rock twang, and AOR sentimentality into one big, ballsy package. It's a surprising and precarious way to kick off an album, especially the follow-up to 2008's Furr, on which Blitzen Trapper stuck primarily to Laurel Canyon folk-rock. Coming on the heels of their more chameleonic and ramshackle breakout LP, Wild Mountain Nation, Furr narrowed Blitzen Trapper's expansive sonic scope. And so it wouldn't be wrong for fans to expect that Destroyer would be even more tightly focused and single-minded in its commitment to honeyed, loose-limbed jams.

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Writing the follow-up to 2008’s Furr was never going to be easy for Eric Earley. Blitzen Trapper’s mountaintop album took the Beatles- and Bob Dylan-influenced pastiche of Wilco’s Summerteeth and expanded it to include even more of Gram Parsons’ country-rock and more of Dylan’s rambling folk, becoming the quintessential album for fans of Portland’s favorite indie sextet. 2009’s Black River Killer EP raised the bar even further, cementing the 2008 sessions’ fabled place in the Pacific Northwest scene. Given the challenge of repeating such a mythical accomplishment, it’s no surprise that Earley feints once toward a new direction, then retreats to patterns well-established on Furr and 2007’s Wild Mountain Nation.

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Live, Blitzen Trapper are a visceral force, rumbling riffs powering their retro take on alt. pop. Yet somehow, on record, the raw power of their live shows is stripped. The band's fifth record, Destroyer of the Void is an unholy sprawl which references Zeppelin, The Beatles and, um, Yes to create a meandering oddity.

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