Album Review: Blitzen Trapper - "All Across This Land"

It’s hard to say what happened to Blitzen Trapper, because in reality, nothing happened to Blitzen Trapper. They were a topic of discussion at one point, and since then they’ve done nothing but release inventive, ambitious, and at-times wonderful albums at a near prolific rate (2012 was the first year we didn’t get new tracks from the band since 2006). Typically bands that explore as many different sounds as Eric Earley and his Oregon-based quintet have, from space cowboy punk music to psychedelic folk to country rap, to a full-album live cover of Neil Young’s Harvest, get more critical doting forced upon them. 

But even the most inventive and unpredictable acts have a default setting - the one that they used to find themselves originally, and the one that they most excel at. Wilco has their early 2000s power pop; Ryan Adams has his confessional, broken-hearted songs; Elvis Costello has his late ‘70s fire-spitting UK-punk, and as Blitzen Trapper prove with All Across This Land, they have their own well to turn to in order to crank out fantastic, career-defining music. 

All Across This Land begins with a mission-statement title track; a classic-rocking Trapper song with clean cut guitar licks and welcome-to-the-show lyrics about life and love across America.

Elsewhere in music (specifically country-flavored music) news, everyone is talking about Ryan Adams sounding like Nebraska-era Springsteen while covering Taylor Swift’s 1989, but the most Springsteen-sounding songs of 2015 (and probably further back) can be found right here at the heart of Blitzen Trapper’s latest - specifically a chorus to “Nights Were Mades For Love” that goes “the days were made for running and the nights were made for us, the days were made for working hard and the nights they were made for love,” and the almost-too-obvious “Cadillac Road” that finds much more depth in it’s long-lost father of a narrator than Springsteen’s own “Cadillac Ranch.”

From the onset to the closing track, this album creates and details an America that is recognizable to any listener - maybe not in the exact specifics of dusty old roads and teenagers, but at least in the ideas put forth by the stories of the specifics.