Blitzen Trapper's sixth album is named for a touring motorcycle meant for long hauls down endless highways, not short joy rides or joyless commutes. The Portland band means to create music that evokes the wind blowing your hair back, the miles falling away behind you, and quite possibly bugs getting stuck in your teeth. Frontman Eric Earley has explained that the album was inspired by the "inescapable past" and the eternal call of the open road-- the latter a specifically American idea that is almost necessarily soundtracked with American music.
To their considerable credit, Blitzen Trapper eschew the spray-on grit of contemporaries like Dawes, Deer Tick, or Dr. Dog. Instead, they embrace a broad definition of Americana that covers the Dead, Kiss, and Pavement. In the past they've shown little hesitation mixing and matching rambling, country-rock melodies against heavy-rock riffs and slack-rock rhythms, creating an anything-goes sound that seemed obstinately determined not to close off any musical avenue, but to roll down every street.
Their early albums, up to and including Wild Mountain Nation, sounded both lively and studious, fresh and familiar. After signing with Sub Pop, however, Blitzen Trapper have been whittling all of those possibilities down to a not-so-sharp point. Goldwing rides the same familiar roads we've been down so many times before, yet even a decade into their career, Blitzen Trapper sound less like denizens of the road than tourists snapping pictures of rock-historical monuments.
After a brief but promising burst of squealing distortion, "Fletcher" settles into a genial ramble, sketching out a hitchhiking character "drinking whiskey from a jar through his teeth" and randomly shooting pistols for fun. These are concrete details, but never pertain to anyone found on the actual road. Instead, the title character comes across as an over-romanticized archetype, a stand-in for the band's infatuation with the America of classic rock rather than the America of 2011. That impression is only reinforced by the ramshackle sound, which is cribbed almost wholesale from the Band-- not from their Big Pink days, but from their less fruitful California period.
In other words, we've been down this road before, with Blitzen Trapper and with so many acts before them. There's no adventure here, no real wanderlust. Even when they try to change things up, it never comes across especially well. The hoedown that opens "Your Crying Eyes" segues abruptly into an ascending riff not too dissimilar to Big Star's "In the Street". While it's a relief that Trapper don't follow that coda through to its logical nu-old-time conclusion, the transition sounds jarring and overthought.
Still, songs like "Your Crying Eyes" and "Street Fighting Sun", with their muscle-car guitars and passing-lane momentum, at least rev up American Goldwing a bit. The album stalls during midtempo numbers "My Home Town" and "Girl in a Coat", which showcase Earley's hangdog vocals and roadside imagery. Ultimately, the trip they're taking us on isn't into America, but into the past, and they show too much reverence for their forebears.
