Blitzen Trapper / American Goldwing - SP949

American Goldwing is Sub Pop’s third full-length release with Portland’s Blitzen Trapper and the band’s sixth full-length overall. Over the course of their career they’ve earned rave reviews (from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, SPIN, and a whole lot more), played on television, appeared at festivals all around the world, done a staggering amount of touring, and sold a whole bunch of records. All of which is distinctly less interesting that what Blitzen Trapper singer/songwriter/guitarist Eric Earley has to say about the band’s new record, American Goldwing…

It’s us letting our loves, our early influences hang out for all to see. Entering into the sounds we grew up with, the hard guitar rock and country picking of our younger years mixes with glimmers of our usual space-aging technology and pawn shop Casio aplomb. Heavy guitar riffs and blasting drum fills live side-by-side with plucking banjos and wailing harmonicas, and muddy slide guitars that make you want to shotgun a beer in the shower while listening to the Stones or Joe Walsh. It’s also our first foray into direct, outside influence in the creation of a record. It’s me letting go in a certain way. I let Tchad Blake come in to mix this album, and my good friend Gregg Williams co-produced all these tracks.

When I sing, in the title track, “I know / I know / I’ll be staying if the wind don’t blow,” I’m seeking to invoke the unseen, the spirit that beckons you to saddle up that old 1980 Honda Goldwing, or your uncle’s beat up Ford Bronco, or that Jeep you somehow, and only barely, keep running and leave this lonely town behind, ‘cause that wind’s always blowing. I’m calling you to ride, to take those curves at speed and head for someplace better where love is true, whether that be into the depths of the galaxy or just to the next truck stop where the neon shines, and where the “company of strangers / and the close and the present dangers” are all that really matters."

Two things! If you’re among the first 500 people to pre-order American Goldwing, you’ll receive a free, high quality, heavy-duty Blitzen Trapper keychain to use with the keys of your personal choosing. Secondly: if you’re among the first three hundred people to pre-order the vinyl, your copy will be on white vinyl!

Released: September 13, 2011

Blitzen Trapper / Destroyer of the Void - SP825

Blitzen Trapper is based in Portland, OR. There are six of them in the band and they’ve been together since 2000. Over the course of their four full-length albums to date, including their revelatory 2008 Sub Pop release Furr, front man Eric Earley’s considerable poetic talents and his band’s hard-earned chops have gained them a growing international audience. The band’s continuing exploration of American music that spans from the ‘60s folk movement to the country sounds of the ’70s, to the pop balladry and prog rock of the ’80s has earned it notice ranging from Rolling Stone magazine to late-night network television to Yo Gabba Gabba, among a great many others. In January 2009 and again in January 2010, Earley and a few of his bandmates entered the attic studio of lauded Portland musician and studio engineer Mike Coykendall (Bright Eyes, M Ward, She & Him) to work on what would become Destroyer of the Void. And the resulting new album takes Blitzen Trapper further than ever before, building on the band’s seamless marriage of the familiar and the fantastic to, literally, create an otherworldly experience.

Released: June 8, 2010

Blitzen Trapper / Furr - SP755

Furr is the fourth record by Portland sextet Blitzen Trapper and the follow-up to last year’s highly acclaimed Wild Mountain Nation. Written in the gaps of the group’s frenetic touring schedule and recorded mostly in a hoary old telegraph building close by the Willamette River, the new record refines and expands on the far-ranging yet distinctive songcraft that lies at the heart of Blitzen Trapper’s unique appeal.

Like its predecessor, Furr was made largely in the group’s studio at Sally Mack’s School of Dance, which is housed in the aforementioned telegraph building near downtown Portland. This is a small T-shaped room with high ceilings, a couch, a hot-plate, and a mixing console. During reprieves from tour, songwriter and producer Eric Earley lived furtively in the studio, crashing on the couch, but rising with the sun or staying up into the nether hours when the other bands in the building quit and went home. It was during these quiet times that the new songs took shape, with rhythm sections printed hot to four-track and then layered and embellished and deconstructed or sometimes just left the way they were.

One key to this new material was an ancient, warped piano that appeared in the hallway one day at Sally Mack’s School of Dance and which was subsequently muscled into the group’s studio. Though out of tune and missing teeth, this piano became the warhorse upon which Earley wrote and recorded much of Furr. The beast has gone away to the landfill now, but you can still hear the clacking and clattering of its rickety skeleton in songs like “Not Your Lover” and “Echo.”

Blitzen Trapper is a group of native Northwesterners, most of whom grew up in Salem, Oregon. They have lived and played together in Portland since 2000. Critics and fans have compared their music to just about everything; there have been calls to coin a new genre. After self-releasing Wild Mountain Nation in June of 2007, the group ventured beyond the West Coast for the first time to tour extensively in Europe and North America. Furr is their first Sub Pop release.

Herewith, the Rolling Stone review of Furr

Released: September 23, 2008

Blitzen Trapper / Wild Mountain Nation - 4075598

From outerspace to down at the farm, campfire singalong to dystopic atonal deconstruction, Wild Mountain Nation presents a raucous and varied constellation of favorite souvenirs from the Trapper’s musical adventures. Brought forth in a spasm of creative mania, Nation is rough-hewn but lush, crackling (sometimes audibly) with a weird and lucid energy. The album was recorded and arranged by the band themselves, using a dizzying variety of techniques and media, including a secret process learned from friendly extraterrestrials. As always, though, the group’s trusty four-track was used to capture the “soul”, “essence”, or “kernel” of each song, which was then buried in a rich humus of articulation, embellishment, and attenuation, so that after the summer a nutritious, colorful variety of fresh music was drooping from the vine (so to speak). A rich harvest: dusty bones, sunrise, Philip K Dick, Guernica, barley wine, sycamore or doug fir, snowflake, Sally Mack’s School of Dance, Scooby-Doo, bigfoot.

Released: July 9, 2007

Blitzen Trapper / Blitzen Trapper - RS-LKCD001

The first Blitzen Trapper album had an initial limited release in late 2003, surprising local critics with its confident mix of musical styles and ambitious songwriting, and powering the group into the venerable Willamette Week’s Top 10 New Portland Bands of 2004. Chock-full of hooks and references to guns, the debut veers from stadium rock to Haight-Ashbury to dank lounge to trailer park rave-up to gas station balladry with devious glee. The only Blitzen Trapper work to have been recorded largely in a proper studio, the making of this album so ruined the band financially that the members were reduced to conditions of complete squalor for many years afterwards, out of which straits came the gloriously ramshackle follow-up, Field Rexx.

Released: July 9, 2007

Blitzen Trapper / Field Rexx - RS-LKCD002

A classic DIY release, Field Rexx was made in the sweltering summer of 2004 with no budget amidst the hiss of flies and tape. “Recorded,” according to the liner notes, “at the carny shack, fer shook n timsel on Duke’s shoot-o-matic for tisks & soda & that ol’
broke 4-track what 3-fingrd mike poured old English on and lit on fire,” Rexx’s warped eclectic pop Americana proves that great songs and performances can transcend squalor and bad album art. Features archival material of the original Trapper, James Earley, performing snippets of traditional hillbilly tunes.

Released: July 9, 2007