Show Details
Blitzen Trapper
with:- Parkington Sisters
- Monday, June 2, 2014
- The Southgate House Revival (The Sanctuary)
- 8pm doors / 8:30pm show
Blitzen Trapper was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2000 by a group of native Pacific Northwesterners, who played around town endlessly to skeleton crowds andgave away an impressive stream of garage recordings on CDR for years. Then came the Blitzen Trapper record in 2003, and Field Rexx in 2005. But it wasn't until 2007's self-released Wild Mountain Nation made a big splash that they finally hit the road, setting the stage for Furr's release the following year. Powered by its title trackand by the G-funk-inflected "Black River Killer" that record became an unlikely hit andthe group suddenly found itself on network television and in glossy magazines andastride colossal festival stages. So they released more music, toured the Western world incessantly, got to work with the likes of Wilco, Stephen Malkmus, Guided ByVoices and Belle & Sebastian, and slowly became the band they'd always dreamed theywould be. Blitzen Trapper are frontman and songwriter Eric Earley, Marty Marquis, Brian Adrian Koch, Michael Van Peltand Erik Menteer.
VII opens with “Feel The Chill,” a southern adventure complete with a woman in her underwear, deer hunting, and of course drowning at the local bar. Earley takes us downa crooked bend so dark and gloomy you can smell the heat and feel the humidityoppress you. “Each song starts from a small place, a headwater like remembrance andthen widens into a song. For instance, that old wreck of a shack buried in evergreen and murky darkness at the bend in the road up on Jackson Hill where we used to drink,never failed to give me a chill driving by in the old Impala for it's implacable mystery,” Earley notes.
Tracks like “Thirsty Man” speak of love in a Dylan-esque fashion where Earley reveals“love like rain falls in the wasteland and slips thru the fingers – for love is a thing thatcannot be held, only felt and released”. “Drive On Up” is a soulful, almost bluesyrendition of small town tales of quirkiness. “It seems you're always driving on up tosomething.” Earley amuses, “into the mountains to see a girlfriend above the reservoir where she lives in a single wide with her mom and a cougar stalks us at fifty yardsthrough the brush, she says to bang sticks but never look it in the eye.”
VII moves effortlessly from track to track, allowing Earley to paint the colorful picturesthat play in our head while singing along. “…there are those songs I keep writing over and over again, Ever Loved Once with all its regrets and tragic lost love, Don't be a Stranger its hopeful cousin but they all still point to the same worn out place in the heartof old E. Earley. And hey, we all have that place, that worn spot on the heart like the chew canister circle on the back pocket of blue jeans, or that one shred in the green feltof the table where you ground the stick in too hard… May these songs minister in waysmysterious and eternal, or at least maybe make you shake a hip.“
