Cheers to Portland's Blitzen Trapper for opening their fifth full-length, Destroyer of the Void, with the album's almost proggy title track. "Destroyer of the Void" ambitiously steamrolls over decades of canonical popular music, squishing it into an epic suite that gathers Beatles harmonies, sci-fi synths, classic rock guitars, country-rock twang, and AOR sentimentality into one big, ballsy package. It's a surprising and precarious way to kick off an album, especially the follow-up to 2008's Furr, on which Blitzen Trapper stuck primarily to Laurel Canyon folk-rock. Coming on the heels of their more chameleonic and ramshackle breakout LP, Wild Mountain Nation, Furr narrowed Blitzen Trapper's expansive sonic scope. And so it wouldn't be wrong for fans to expect that Destroyer would be even more tightly focused and single-minded in its commitment to honeyed, loose-limbed jams.
The rest of the album is more expected-- full of haunting songs doused in harmonicas, saloon pianos, and dusty guitars. Unlike many of their contemporaries doing the bearded-70s-folk-rocker thing, Blitzen Trapper's influences lie less with hippie-ish CSNY or the Grateful Dead and more with the rugged late-60s roots-rock of Bob Dylan and the Band. Blitzen Trapper's version of Americana is one of the most melodic and playful (and least affectedly twangy) since Being There-era Wilco, and Eric Earley uses his craggy Dylanesque voice to add grit to his more featherweight melodies.
Though dark, dry murder ballad "The Man Who Would Speak True" feels like a second chapter to Furr's gothic "Black River Killer" and "Heaven and Earth" sounds like a bruised version of that album's "Not Your Lover", Destroyer, as a whole, doesn't play like [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| Furr Pt. 2 [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . In and amongst the acoustic narratives that populate the album is a sludgy, metallic rocker ("Love and Hate"), rhythmic, Tom Petty-ish roots-pop ("Evening Star"), and a delicate duet with hometown chanteuse Alela Diane ("The Tree", the album's best song) that allow Earley and his crew to flex little used muscles and grow in surprising directions.
If anything, the record could use more prog pomp. With an opener as strong as "Destroyer of the Void", you could be forgiven for being disappointed that it is the collection's sole foray into spacey prog-pop territory and not the tip of the iceberg in a likeminded collection. Perhaps now that they've perfected their earthy, rootsy sound, Blitzen Trapper can travel to a more astral plane on its next album. After all, they've already blazed the trail.
