Blitzen Trapper Blows the Roof Off the Kenworthy, Hundreds Presumed Overjoyed

So, the night before driving the ten hours to Klamath Falls, Oregon for Lindsey's on-campus job interview, we remembered at the last minute that months ago we'd bought tickets for a show that Blitzen Trapper was playing in Moscow that night. We waffled on whether or not we should actually go at first, then decided to check it out, because how often do nationally-recognized bands come to town? By the end of the show, we were really glad that we did.

Blitzen Trapper has been one of those bands that's been hovering at the edge of my brain for a long time. Like Wilco years ago, then Josh Ritter, then Radiohead, and most recently Mike Gordon Band (and even Phish, honestly, at one point in my life), Blitzen Trapper is a band that I'd heard of, and whose songs I'd heard a few of, and whose musical pedigree I knew. I've had a suspicion for awhile that they were a perfect match for my musical tastes, but for some reason I never managed to "get into" them properly. When I get excited about a band, I tend to need to hear all of their albums and get obsessed with the minutiae of every single track for a few months to the near-exclusion of all other music. This detail-oriented approach is really satisfying on one hand, but on the other hand it makes diving into a band a big investment, and I think I need something to really grab me before I'm willing to get really obsessive/excited. Often, this "something" is seeing a band play live.

A band that's good live is usually infinitely more interesting to me than a well-done album (though not always). A band that comes out on stage, plays their hearts out, and are accomplished enough as musicians to not just regurgitate a record back at me in its entirety is way more likely to get me excited about digging into their catalog than anything else. For one thing, I like the idea of musicians who play for the sake of playing, not for the sake of crafting one finely-tuned and "perfect" manifestation of their songs and then leaving it at that and seeing how far they can ride that one moment of creation. This is probably ultimately why I like bands like Phish and Wilco so much: they're clearly playing for the joy of playing, and part of the result of that process is that it is a process. Sure, both bands put out great albums with great songs, but there are also many, many versions and live takes on those songs that have their own quirks and details that are worth digging into. It satisfies the weird, obsessive, collector's mentality I have when it comes to music while also serving as a tacit reassurance that the musicians enjoy what they're doing enough to keep creating and recreating as part of the process of writing and playing together.

Spoiler alert: Blitzen Trapper hit all of these buttons in about the first ten minutes of their show at the Kenworthy. They're clearly really talented, their music runs the gamut across a number of genres that I enjoy, and they weren't at all afraid to just rock the hell out for the sheer joy of it. The show was apparently their first back after a long period of being away from touring, and while some rust definitely showed (missed changes, lots of forgotten lyrics), it was such a small, intimate, and fun show, and the band treated the whole experience so informally that the roughness added to the show rather than subtracting from it.

I only knew a few songs (mostly from their album Furr, which is the only album of theirs that I own), but they played a few of the hits off of it as well as a lot of deeper cuts that were nonetheless immediately accessible and satisfying for anyone inclined toward some Americana/folk/jam/70s-rock/psychedelia mash-up.

One of the things I like best about the band is the lead singer's voice, which is somewhere between Bob Dylan (when he's folking) and Geddy Lee (when he's rocking).

They're also a lot more prog-rock in some respects live than I expected from the album that I'd heard, including a number of new, possibly-on-the-new-album songs that recalled Wilco's more abstract soundscapes to me, and I'm almost more excited now about what they'll put out next rather than what they've already put out. Here's a great video from the show of the new song "Heart Attack" (sorry, no embedding).

My favorite part was probably an especially spirited version of "God & Suicide" from Furr. There was also an amazing impromptu rock/psycho keyboard/harmonica jam at the end of some other song, but I don't know what song it was and there doesn't appear to be any video.

Anyway, it was an amazingly great show, not even considering the fact that it was in the intimate-but-with-great-sound local Kenworthy theater in Moscow, and we didn't have to fight for parking or worry about public transit to get there. The morning after, I also found that Blitzen Trapper has a huge collection of their live shows on Archive.org, and that many of the recordings or SBDs or SBD matrixes.

The takeaway here is that I'm going to be listening to Blitzen Trapper a lot more this summer.