Blitzen Trapper Vinyl, CD & tapes by Blitzen Trapper at Norman Records

Blitzen Trapper’s Furr gets a tenth-anniversary reissue. Over the years, this LP has come to be considered one of the signature Sub Pop releases - quite a feat when you consider the competition. Dropping at a time when The Shins were still accepted as a good band and freak-folk was a thing, this record throws together the sounds of Pavement, Devendra Banhart and Eels for some Portland pleasantness. This deluxe edition features the Record Store Day singles ‘War Is Placebo’, ‘Maybe Baby’ and ‘Booksmart Baby’, some live recordings for KRCW, and seven hitherto-unreleased tracks.

Portland’s own Blitzen Trapper  present an album described as “Half musical - Half rock-opera” (which in my mind is a bit like being half strangled / half drowned), it’s also a companion piece to their 2008 album Furr. We have seven songs from the production with the themes (“darker dystopian stories of rural and suburban west coast death-drive via a riffing psychedelic landscape”) expanded to get us up to twelve tracks. We all like to get wild and we all like to get reckless. But Wild & Reckless? The choice is yours.

Over the years Blitzen Trapper have incorporated just about every kind of guitar based music into their sound from indie-folk, alt. country, alt. rock and psychedelia. It seems the experimentation with different styles has paid off as their new album All Across This Land seems to tie up all the these strands into one focused and brilliant piece of work.