Crash Course No. 35: Blitzen Trapper, Origin Story to End(?)

Yep, just like he said.

While I came a couple years late to the Blitzen Trapper party, I geeked out hard first and most to the same album that everyone else did: 2008’s Furr. In fact, that album deserves as much credit as any other for guiding me toward more rustic sounds. Which I have always resisted more than most genres…though it helped it was leavened with lots and lots of rock...

And now, a crash course on their story.

The Very Basics
“I always thought that Blitzen Trapper, the sort of classic lineup, was like a benevolent psychedelic street gang. Not a scary street gang.”
- Eric Johnson (of Fruit Bats), Talk House interview, 2020

Blitzen Trapper semi-officially formed circa 2000 under the name Garmonbozia and self-released three albums. Nearly all of the original (and surprisingly stable) line-up hailed from the “outskirts of Salem, Oregon,” and included: Eric Earley (guitar/harmonica/vocals/keys), Eric Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals/harmonica…a lot of harmonica), Michael Van Pelt (bass), Drew Laughery (keys), and Marty Marquis (guitar/keys/vocals/melodica); Marquis counts as the geographic outlier, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and the band became a five-piece when Laughery left around 2010 - e.g., after the tour supporting Destroyer of the Void. A couple songs carried over from the Garmonbozia period (~ 2000-2003; e.g., a proto-version of “Sadie,” “The All Girl Team,” and “Reno”), but the sound that made them famous hadn’t taken shape point. A quote in Wikipedia’s write-up describes Garmonbozia’s sound like so:

“Many of the Garmonbozia recordings are experimental prog-rock and psychedelic songs, more concerned with creating interesting soundscapes than the tighter rock/soul/country/pop crispness of their later albums.”

The band switched it’s name to Blitzen Trapper in 2003. When reflecting on those earliest days with Eric Johnson (see the Talk House interview), Earley agreed they were fortunate to come up in “a good time to wander your way into things,” aka, posting songs on a MySpace page and getting signed to a label. And now feels like a good time to confess that my greatest disappointment in reading about Blitzen Trapper came with learning that Earley did nearly all the songwriting and that he conceived albums as far back as American Goldwing as solo projects. Going the other way (and I lifted this from a recent Street Roots feature on (again) Earley): “Holy Smokes could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism.” (Or, from the Talk House interview: “A lot of Blitzen Trapper was trying to navigate those two realities, the recordings and the band.”)

Crash-Course, No. 27: Viva Viva Voce

Also the name of a German a capella group.

Viva Voce was a two-member outfit built around husband and wife, Kevin and Anita Robinson (nee Anita Elliott), so it’s not too surprising the band ended when they divorced. They started out in their native Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1998, before relocating (first) to Nashville, Tennessee, then Portland, Oregon - apparently, with some prodding by Menomena’s Danny Seim - where they spent most of their careers. They played most of that time as a two-piece, even live and, if you spend any time listening to them, they put out an impressive amount of volume, variety and texture with just two people. A Guitar World interview with Anita that came out around the same time as their final album (lots of great gear/guitar talk in that one, btw), The Future Will Destroy You, neatly summed up how that worked in practice:

“With Kevin manning the drums while also playing acoustic guitar (no kidding!) and singing, and Anita playing lead guitar while singing ethereal lead vocals, their live sound is surprisingly fat and ballsy for just two players.”

Viva Voce lasted over a decade as a going concern - not bad for an indie outfit - and, per Wikipedia, toured with some of their bigger peers, like Jimmy Eats World and The Shins. That gave them enough time to drop a pretty healthy discography, spanning from 1998’s Hooray for Now to The Future; their breakthrough album, to the extent they had one, was 2004’s The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, which got them big enough to tour in Europe (if I combine sources here - Wikipedia and a 2014 Willamette Week piece on Kevin’s (ungentle) life after the split (seriously, oof), that could be when they got on board with a UK indie label called Full Time Hobby). Another thing worth noting: they expanded to a four-piece, at least for touring purposes, during/after 2009’s release of Rose City (5th album; cute song, btw), by adding Evan Railton (instrument unknown) and Corinna Repp (guitar, I’m guessing).

That Willamette Week piece flags the tour for The Future as the beginning of a very sharp end: Kevin colorfully described the experience as “going from one beheading to the next.” It’s funny, if only in that highly-specific context, to read a 2005 appreciation of The Heat (etc.)/evil prophecy from the UK's Independent regarding how many bands built on two people implode in white-hot recriminations - and woe betide the people dumb enough to attempt it while married (though it’s nice when the same article credits Sonny and Cher for being “troupers” for reaching “an amicable rapprochement after their split). Good on calling the future…I guess?

Crash-Course, No. 25: The Happy Fits, It Came From Spotify...

Who could say no to those faces?

[Ed. - This was a good format, so I’m keeping it for this post…and holding it as a thought.]

Who They’re For
Picking through the influences they name - e.g., The Killers, The Strokes, Young the Giant and Two Door Cinema (who…got me) - gives a fair impression. So, lots of angular sounds, generally up-tempo stuff, with a 2000s throw-back vibe. Maybe the easiest way to explain is to let their lead vocalist*/mainsongwriter/cellist, Calvin Langman talk about inspirations:

“One thing all these bands do in common is that they write awesome melodies that make you want to scream and dance your butt off.”

That’s right, he’s a cellist…classically-trained too.

A Little More
“It’s rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what we want to be called. That’s what I feel when I play bar chords on a cello. Nod your head, tap your feet.”

Langman met his original co-collaborator, Ross Monteith in high school and through a combination of Latin class and facebook. After talking about the guitar covers Monteith posted and finding they liked the same sounds - in someone else’s words “A shared affinity for crisp melodies and crunching guitar” - Langman passed on the bones of a couple songs he wrote to Monteith (think it was “Dirty Imbecile”) and they decided to start playing together. A four-song EP they titled Awfully Apeelin’ came out of that and they posted it to Spotify for family and friends and went off to college - separate ones, from the sound of it. It was a lark, basically…

…until Spotify got their hands on it and dropped it onto one suitable Discover Weekly playlist after another (mine included), pushing and pushing and pushing until “While You Fade Away” became a brand-new baby/the No. 5 of the 50th most-viral songs posted to the service (for 2018). Monteith dropped out of college one semester later, Langman after two - and The Happy Fits were born. The band’s drummer, Luke Davis, has perhaps the best origin story. The other two brought him in as a session drummer to complete their debut album, Concentrate (2018): “I didn’t even think anything of it. I was like, ‘70 bucks man, that sounds awesome!’ As a college kid, that’s like the gold mine.”

Crash-Course, No. 24: The Lemon Twigs, Cool, Connected Theater Kids

In their natural state....

“Brian: Creatively, it's been pretty healthy since we've started enjoying each other's music --

Michael: We just get out of each other's faces.

Brian: But there's like a looming question of the fact that we split the duties and we fill up an album with half my songs and half of Michael's songs, basically.

Michael: What's the looming question? I'm still waiting on the looming question. Nothing's looming.

Brian: It's looming so much that I'll never get to it.”

That exchange is about four years old, but it sums up the functioning relationship between brothers behind The Lemon Twigs, Michael and Brian D’Addario. People with patience for sibling squabbling can enjoy through an extended version of it in a two-part interview with an outlet called Face Culture from a year earlier (pt. 1 and pt. 2). They’re both very young in that one - Brian around 18, and Michael just 16 - and it takes a little while to warm up…but once it does, holy shit, is it entertaining (it’s comedy gold for me). They did interviews separately after that, at least for a while. As Michael explained in a 2018 interview with The Independent, “Better to contradict than to be cut off.”

Spotify hepped me to The Lemon Twigs about [two and a half years] go with “Tailor Made,” which dropped me in the early-middle portion of their output. Without knowing anything about them, I thought they’d read my likes and fed me either an old 70s song, or some throwback act pushing their mid-20s or so. Turns out the actual story is much odder.

The D’Addarios grew up in a musical family from Hicksville, Long Island - one wired enough into that world where they could ask Todd Rundgren to sing a part on their second album. Both brothers have been performing since childhood, doing everything from Youtube videos to multiple shows on Broadway - e.g., from 2018 article in an outlet called Another Man Mag (this is Michael), “Assassins, The King and I, South Pacific and Oklahoma as childhood favourites, in addition to early roles in Oliver and “fucking Les Mis and stuff like that” - to movies involving Ethan Hawke and Michelle Pfeiffer. They started writing their own material by age 7 (per Brian, “basically a Monkees song” called “Girl”). They put out Do Hollywood in 2016, an either conscious or unconscious homage to The Beatles or The Beach Boys, or even Procol Harum (that Face Culture interview is messy), but a mid-60s Beatles influence comes through very cleanly on a track like “Those Days Is Comin’ Soon” (or “Haroomata”), among others. Their debut EP, Brothers of Destruction, makes a case for my, frankly, shaky understanding of The Beach Boys - e.g., “Why Didn’t You Say That?”

The Crash-Course Project Index

Finding Your Feet, a comedy featuring Dolores Umbridge, apparently...

Welcome to this library of…posts about popular music. Unfortunately, I’ll have to start this with an explanation.

At the time I’m posting this little (for now) index, I’ve written a total of 57 posts for this site. 20 of those were devoted to the One Hit No More Project (and here’s the library for that one, which will grow just like this one), which leaves 37 posts about…other things. I changed both topics and formats between those posts, covering just one band/artist here, and building a post a round a playlist with multiple artists there. Call it a long process of finding my feet – which I think I have going into 2020 (also, I make regular claims to have found my feet, but they keep going missing all the same).

In order to lend both this library and posts I intend to write in the future some thematic coherence, I’ve decided to limit this index to posts in which I focused on one band/artist. (And, in accordance with future plans, I will create a separate index for those playlist posts.) About those posts…

While I cover a decent variety of bands/artists, the majority of them come from “indie ______” genres – e.g., “indie rock,” “indie hip hop,” and “indie pop,” with various sub-genres in between. Those will be the same kinds of artists I look into going forward too. At any rate, links to all the posts of this sort that I’ve written so far are linked to down below. As I write more posts going forward, I’ll add them to this post with semi-regularity to keep this library current.

Finally, you’ll see a bunch of different titles below, as well as a discontinued series or two. Going forward, I’ve decided to continue this under the “Crash Course” series, so the numbers will count up from there (and I dropped the hyphen in “Crash-Course”). That’s all, lots to read below - and listen to. Each post includes a short-ish history of the relevant band/artist, as well as links to a bunch of their music. God bless, Youtube, right?

Crash Course, No. 16: Ween, Triumph, Breakdown, and a Tenuous Aftermath

Weird, sure, but so much more. Goddamn heroes.

“I can only speak for myself, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as Aaron and I are both alive on this planet, Ween is still together. We’ve never broken up. The idea of quitting is just laughable. This isn’t something you can quit. This is a life sentence.”
- Dean Ween, aka, Mickey Melchiondo

“The Caesar demo release was the straw that broke the camels back. Nobody asked Gener before releasing...Deaner broke the golden rule. the Boognish wept that day.”
- Gene Ween, aka, Aaron Freeman

Whatever meaningful conscious knowledge I’ve ever had of Ween started when I looked into FREEMAN, Aaron Freeman’s post-Ween, post-sobriety solo project for an earlier, now-deleted site, so that’s where I started. (And, for the record, “the Caesar demo” was a collection of unreleased demos recorded while they were working on Quebec, circa 2001-2003.) While I’d had Chocolate & Cheese and Paintin’ the Town Brown for a decade or so, I knew only the tiniest part of dick about Ween – which, also for the record, was inspired by a combination of the words “wuss” and “penis.” [Ed. – per new editorial policy, all sources for this post will be linked to at the end. Just…feels better that way.]

Ween’s 2012 break was both rough and a long-time coming, according to Freeman, and both he and Melchiondo processed it differently – the former as a matter of survival, the latter as a blow. Melchiondo kept going and in a similar vein: he revived his existing side project, Moistboyz, and keeps plugging away with the Dean Ween Group. The latter (and maybe the former) still played regularly at the same venue that hosted Ween’s earliest shows – John & Peter’s in their hometown, New Hope, PA (right on the Jersey border!) – as of 2018. Melchiondo does not appear to be sober, and he still plays with a lot of guys from the Ween days: e.g., Claude Colman, Jr. (drummer, third member of Ween), Dave Dreiwitz (bass) and Glenn McClellan (keys, both from Ween’s second iteration). He built his own studio and he still makes himself available to all kinds of media (including one interview with Noisey’s Guitar Moves series that I decided to drag out of the Sources because, on it, Melchiondo talked about Ween’s (and his) signature sound and/or hooks).

Crash Course, No. 13: Ezra Furman, You've Already Missed Too Much

Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus?

Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.

As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):

“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”

The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.

OK, on with the rest of it.

Personal

As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.

April 2019 MAME Playlist: Mellow ATL, DIY England and Troubled Toronto

So simple, so good.

Welcome to the April 2019 MAME Playlist post, which, in a better world, will be the last whale I produce. (Here’s to hoping future plans come together). I posted a 50-song playlist for the month (there’s more where that came from; username snackyd), and all the songs on that playlist are linked to somewhere down below. I highlight three artists (chosen more or less at random) down below - Faye Webster, Martha (the band, not a person), and Shad – by sharing some stuff about who they are, where they come from and what they do. The rest of the playlist is mostly random. Mostly.

I posted some other write-ups on some other artists earlier this month, and some of the songs by those bands stuck to this month’s playlist. You can read about them in those posts, which I’ve linked to under the names of each band, and I’ll list/link to the songs by each that I held onto for this playlist. Those include: Weyes Blood (mellow, airy indie with gorgeous vocals, “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” “Andromeda,” and “Mirror Forever”); Orange Goblin (metal from the hard rock school mostly, “The Astral Project,” “Magic Carpet,” and “Aquatic Fanatic”); and The Who (you know them, but the story behind Lifehouse is a doozy, “Whiskey Man,” “Pictures of Lily,” “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” “Relay,” “5:15,” and “Slip Kid”).

All right, time to look at this month’s playlist’s featured artists…in which I accidentally go from oldest to youngest.

Faye Webster, [Eponymous]
I think it was last month when Discover Weekly pitched Faye Webster’s “Room Temperature” my way. It’s probably part of the promotional push for Webster’s upcoming album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, and, between that and the still-better, “Kingston,” I have high hopes for that new release. But it’s not out yet (think it said late May, like, May 26), so I’m stuck with her 2017 eponymous album. The one with the understatedly freaking awesome album cover (see above).

Webster comes from Atlanta, Georgia, and a creative family (something I see a lot when researching musicians). Musically, she grew up on old country, but branched out into Atlanta-area local hip hop – specifically, material put out by Awful Records. That branching out eventually lead her to membership in a “rap collective” called PSA, and you hear both influences in her sound. Her choice of instruments that makes her earliest influences stand out more: “No matter what music I end up making I will always use pedal steel... It's in my roots. I love pedal steel.”

The 1st Quarter 2019 Playlust Playlist: My (Weird) Top 75 from the First Three Months of 2019

My joke about a second take back-fired.

[Ed. – I actually held onto a few posts from A Project of Self-Indulgence, the first several artist profiles of 2019 among them. Because the 1st Quarter Playlist that I’m putting up includes a fair number of artists on this list, I thought I’d repost these summaries to give people an intro to the artists they hear on the playlist. Just the good ones, mind you. And, now, without preamble…]

Masego
“Anytime I’ve tried to make this recipe for dopeness, it just doesn’t work.”

That doesn’t so much sum up Masego, the stage-name for the fairly-recently launched Micah Davis, as embody him. He describes his influences – jazz-era legend Cab Calloway and Jamie Foxx, of all people, not to mention Pharrell, and OutKast’s Andre 3000 – while also talking about how much he relies on improvisation when making music. He trips when he tries to too-consciously follow his idols.

Masego is a fairly recent act, someone I found when the Portland Mercury named his Lady Lady as one of their top albums of 2018. Personally, the connection came slowly and through inaction: every time I came close to skipping a song, I’d inevitably counsel myself to give it “just a couple more seconds.” I only noticed I’d stopped saying that when Spotify started playing another artist. Lady Lady is the kind of magnetic, low-upon-first-listen kind of albums, but it’s something I sank into, and without noticing it much. I pulled “Lavish Lullaby,” “Old Age” and “Just A Little” to the playlist and, the more I listen to them, and read up on him, the more all that feels like a toe-hold onto something bigger. Judging by the fact he was scheduled to headline a European/North American tour shortly after this interview, says that The Mercury and me aren’t the only people who can’t quite find the skip button.

Born in Jamaica, raised in Newport News, Virginia, by an entrepreneur and a guy in the U.S Air Force, both of them pastors, Masego comes from Soundcloud, and the internet in general. He calls what he does “TrapHouseJazz” (and…I’ll accept it), and, from one interview to the next – whether in a WAMU 85 Bandwidth.fm interview (source for the quote up top), or one with Billboard (link above) – understanding what that means requires some long-form reading. To give an example, he neither reads nor writes music, but, in a testament to his drive and/or compulsion, he created his own musical notation that he understands well enough to translate for others. Most often, though, he just sits down and lets it happen – and, after that, he invites in more people (something about 100 people being “in TrapHouseJazz”). Call it hyper-, open-source collaboration with all kinds of anyone he can find. The man (age 25) even created an app called Network, in order to enable the kind of collaboration that works for him – and probably people of his generation.