The Oregonians of Blitzen Trapper often sounded
like a ray-gun-wielding Grateful Dead cover band on 2007's Wild Mountain
Nation,
so it's no surprise that frontman Eric Earley calls himself a "moonwalking
cowboy" and implores listeners to "leave this world somehow" on the band's
fourth full-length. More surprising is the fact that it isn't all meaningless
science-fiction babble: On its most focused album yet, Blitzen Trapper seems
concerned with the ways a person can escape the terrestrial while staying on
earth. Furr
is a celebration of passion and abandon, featuring teens gone feral,
God-fearing psycho killers, and other characters engulfed by the dangerous,
antisocial forces of love, dance, God, and suicide. Throughout, Earley stresses
how primal instinct magnifies rather than destroys identity, so it makes a kind of
unexpected sense that these 12 roots-rocking songs come with less blippy
weirdness and fewer noisy sideshows than before. Blitzen Trapper is just acting
natural: The Neil Young and Beatles influences are laid bare, the quirkiness is
now more tuneful than cerebral, and the band has surrendered to the basic human
craving for candied country melodies.