Blitzen Trapper
Erik’s Trip
Blitzen Trapper’s new album is its most ambitious yet

By Chris Drabick

To this point in its career, ambitious would be an obvious descriptor for Portland, Oregon’s Blitzen Trapper. Earlier records were schizophrenic mixtures of Beck-like musical collages and stoner rock of the sort you’d expect from mid-’70s Pink Floyd. The sound began to gel with 2007’s Wild Mountain Nation, which found the band taking a slightly less eclectic approach and concentrating on a more Americana-based sound.

Blitzen Trapper’s career took shape as it signed to Sub Pop for 2008’s outstanding Furr. That record honed their most bucolic tendencies into a cohesive whole, and garnered the band their greatest critical hosannas to date. All of this was scant preparation for Blitzen Trapper’s most ambitious move to date; the sweeping, grand scope of Destroyer of the Void.

“I was really concentrating on a certain fundamental honesty with the lyrics on this record,” explains singer Erik Early. “[We were] attempting to make music that would fit those ideas so in ways I guess it's an ambitious undertaking. I also took more time on this record and the choosing of the songs to be used was a pretty drawn out process. I produced [it] at Mike Coykendall's studio in Southeast Portland in early 2009 and early 2010, made in two parts basically, recorded to tape and mixed there as well.”
The disjointed nature of the recording doesn’t preclude Destroyer of the Void from sounding coherent. The band, swelled to a six-piece these days, moves deftly between the complex pop-rock of “Laughing Lover” and the piano-heavy “Sadie.” Throughout, Blitzen Trapper’s affection for rock history is obvious, whether they’re drawing from CSN&Y (the vocal harmonies of the title track), the Rolling Stones’ swampier moments (“Dragon’s Song”) or the Band (“Evening Star”). The record has a lived-in feel that suggests these are road songs, borne of the dull hours between tour stops. Just the opposite is true, according to Early.

“The road is a place to find experiences and live on the move and meet people and perform,” he says. “Writing for me is a private peaceful matter, and I need space to do it. Lyrically, I use a lot of almost cinematic imagery, [and] I draw on what I'm familiar with which is the area I grew up living in. This is what I know and am comfortable writing about.”

The band’s lyrics have long been a focus for Early, and his novelist’s attention to detail is in effect throughout Destroyer. The standout “The Man Who Would Speak True” is delivered with only acoustic guitar accompaniment to accentuate the fable-like lyrics. “For me there's really no boundary between the lyric and the music, at least there shouldn't be,” says Early by way of explaining his lyrical approach. “Later on the lyric means the most to me, for personal reasons.”

Perhaps one of the most surprising bits about Destroyer of the Void is that several of the record’s songs were written years ago, but dusted off and re-recorded for inclusion here. “They just seemed like songs ready to make an appearance,” Early says in reference to these older tunes. “It was their time and I had fun re-recording them, re-imagining them.”

The band is preparing an extensive summer tour to support the new record. They’ll be on the road through August, including appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and Lollapalooza in Chicago. Though Early only writes at home, he gets plenty of inspiration on the road.

“It's probably more of a subconscious thing,” he says. “Traveling great distances through all kind of terrain for weeks will tell you things, the voices you hear in those places come from strange places deep in the ground. It takes time to realize what makes sense out of all these possibilities.”