mia indie music

Blitzen Trapper
American Goldwing

September 13, 2011
Sub Pop

“Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley performs the amazing feat of making alt-country seem fresh on the band’s gripping sixth album.” – Spin

“What follows is a lovingly balanced set of rural rockers (“Street Fighting Sun”) and dirt road ballads (“Girl in a Coat”) that sound about as far from the murky introspection of 2010’s Destroyer of the Void as one would expect from a band that continuously tries to reinvent themselves within their own psych-folk/alt-country/indie rock universe, and almost always succeeds.” – All Music Guide

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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.

Blitzen Trapper
Destroyer of the Void

Sub Pop
June 8, 2010

“The 12 artfully crafted songs here suggest Blitzen Trapper should now be judged in the elevated company of Wilco, Brendan Benson and The Raconteurs.” – Uncut

“We get their most pastoral outing to date, piano ballads one minutes, laid-back Neil Young the next.” – Q Magazine

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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.