Music Matters
Blitzen Trapper falls into the Void— and their sound suffers
Blitzen Trapper burst onto the scene with a great album.
Destroyer of the Void is an inconsistent, rollercoaster of an album.
Two years ago, Portland, Orgeon-based Blitzen Trapper came out of left field to drop Furr one of the year’s finest albums, an excellent amalgamation of '70s country rock and folk influences bound together by the wonderful songwriting skills of frontman Eric Earley. As a matter of fact, I found it odd when Fleet Foxes, a thematically similar band, got all of the year-end love since Blitzen Trapper, to me, had the edge not only in songwriting but also in their willingness to explore a variety of sounds.
That spirit of experimentation goes a bit haywire at times on their latest release, Destroyer Of The Void. If the album title sounds like something you would expect to come from Rush, you’re on the right track.
The title track unabashedly heads for prog-rock territory, all weird synthesizers and multitracked harmonies and tonal shifts arriving in quick succession one on top of another. If the band didn’t want its sound to be too narrowly defined, cramming approximately 83 genres into one song is one way to accomplish that, I suppose.
Such an approach becomes problematic when the genre comes before the song, and that’s where Destroyer Of The Voidgets tripped up. After the title track sets the uneven tone, “Laughing Lover,” a galloping rocker, and “Below The Hurricane,” an acoustic, quasi-mystical track that sounds like a Styx album cut, also come straight from the prog playbook. That would be fine if the songs were memorable enough to center all the excess, but they’re not.
Things finally get on firmer footing with “The Man Who Would Speak True,” where Earley indulges in the mythical outlaw fixation that also produced “Black River Killer” from Furr. His rapid-fire rhymes, which have earned him more than a few Dylan comparisons, finally start to hit home with a memorable tune on which they can hang.
From there on out things improve dramatically. “Love And Hate” has a surprising glam strut that I never thought the band capable of based on past efforts. “Evening Star” is dripping with venomous one-liners, as Earley excoriates a wayward girl with impressive results. The genre trappings of these tracks are less jarring because the songs to which they’re attached are strong of their own accord.
Elsewhere, Alela Diane plays the Joan Baez role in the charming “The Tree,” a duet that rides high on a gorgeous melody and a lovely vocal performance from both singers. But Earley also falls into simile overload at times, and he has a tendency to lock into similar rhyme schemes again and again, leaving tracks like “The Tailor” or “Dragon’s Song” a bit indistinguishable.
The album goes out on a high note with the earnest piano ballad “Sadie,” which comes on like a cross between Jackson Browne and a hair-metal power ballad, and yet works in spite of that odd mixture. Earley brings the whole, unwieldy album to a conclusion with the simple refrain “Sadie, I can never change,” some much-needed human emotion shining through all of the mythopoetic musings of the previous songs.
It’s a bit of a misleading line though, since Blitzen Trapper seems so recklessly chameleoniac on everything that has led up to that point.
Destroyer Of The Void is a rollercoaster of an album, with some undeniable highs standing out above the ambitious misfires. Let’s hope that Earley and company can prune those unnecessary stylistic left turns next time around, lest their talent get lost in an identity crisis.
SAMPLE "DESTROYER OF THE VOID"
Adobe Flash Required for flash player."Destroyer of the Void"
Adobe Flash Required for flash player."Evening Star"
Adobe Flash Required for flash player."Sadie"
