Blitzen Trapper Are Animals

12/03/08 5:00pm

by Alyssa Noel (CHARTattack)

To conserve the purity of Blitzen Trapper's title track first single off their latest album, Furr, let's assume the love interest is a wolf-woman and not human.

"Furr" tells the fantastic tale of a man who wanders into the woods, morphs into a kind of lupine creature and winds up falling in love.

The outdoorsy scene in which the story takes place (listen carefully: there's actually an animal howling at one point), along with the acoustic guitar and the rich vocals, help put this song among the best examples of an ever-growing new brand of experimental folk music played by the likes of Iron & Wine, Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes.

Vocalist/guitarist Eric Earley, who also produced Furr, won't call the genre a trend, but admits bands are making this kind of music like never before.

"Any group writing good songs will take off," he said from the road recently. "And now, a lot of people are doing more natural instrument, non-electronic music, and they're doing it well."

Only a few of the band's songs fit this description — not because they're inadequate folk songs, but because only a handful can actually be categorized this way.

With jangly '70s sunshine pop next to an aggressive rock song, Furr doesn't fit neatly into any slot. The band's strange album art — an '80s metal logo – is meant to convey these eclectic tendencies, Earley says.

"I think the logo is a juxtaposition of totally adverse genrefication. It's a metal logo burned into a piece of wood. It typifies a lot of what we're trying to do: ignoring genres and conventions."

Although the album is varied, many critics argue it's much narrower in scope than 2007's Wild Mountain Nation. Although that record was hailed by many as their "breakthrough," Earley says it was more about critics lapping it up than music fans shelling out cash for it.

"I feel like this record, it's more accessible in a lot of ways, but it's more complex lyrically and I think there's more meaningful stuff going on. The record before was good, but it was this gimmicky lo-fi thing going on that the critics seem to like, but people in general didn't think it was accessible."

Blitzen Trapper's last date for the year is at Vancouver's Media Club on Dec. 6 with Parson Red Heads.