Blitzen Trapper

Overview

If listening to Blitzen Trapper’s earlier tracks make you think of sleeping by a river, cooking meals on a hot plate and hiding knives to thwart old crack whores and dealers lingering in nearby alcoves, it’s probably because singer/guitarist Eric Earley was actually doing all those things when he wrote them.

Earley is no longer homeless, but the genre-straddling band from Portland, Oregon still makes music that evokes the freedom of speeding across an interstate highway before the advent of the Hertz NeverLost GPS system. Their latest album American Goldwing utilises guitar riffs and blasting drum fills louder than the horn of a Detroit Diesel truck, but offsets them with wailing harmonicas and country plucking banjos more suited to porch sitting with a flagon of whisky and a pipe of tobacco than being chased down a river Deliverance-style by rife-wielding mountain men.

This is the record Blitzen Trapper describe as the “real record”, and it’s the one they’ll be playing at Oxford Art Factory on Thursday. Loaded shotguns and bottles of whisky are probably on the list of prohibited items, but with a live show this frenzied that’s probably a good thing anyway.