WHO ARE THEY?
A sextet from indie-rock it-city Portland, Oregon, whose second album, Wild Mountain Nation, came out last year to a steadily rising tide of acclaim. Their lawless alpine country has since been annexed by Sub Pop, who’ll release the band’s next album, Furr, in September.

WHAT’S THEIR DEAL?
They might be from a hip town, but the Blitzen Trapper sound is built on southern rock’s sturdy foundation, reinvigorated by injections of whacked-out synth and rendered in twangy lo-fi. Guitarist Marty Marquis calls it “classic rock remixed for the 21st century. We’re drawing on this golden age of rock a lot but a lot of the guys are big fans of Sonic Youth and Pavement and newer things too.”

THEY HAVE SOUTHERN ROCK IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST?
Although the members mostly grew up in nearby Salem, Oregon, Marquis (who’s from Yakima, Washington) met the band’s singer/guitarist and primary songwriter Eric Earley in college in Georgia, where they started playing together. After graduation, the future band members drifted towards Portland, where Earley started putting things in motion. “He had a big box full of demos that he had recorded,” Marquis says, “and I was blown away by the quality of the material.” The band formed in 2000, releasing two albums before deciding to give the project a serious push. “There comes a point where you realize, ‘We’re pretty good at what we do, and we could do this full time if we make some decisions and go for it that way.’ So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last year.”

AREN’T MOST AMERICANA-TYPES REALLY TRADITIONAL? WHAT’S WITH THE WEIRD NOISES?
“When we first started playing, we were a lot more experimental even,” Marquis laughs. “We had a lot of eight-, nine-minute-long songs and we’d never pause in our set. It’d just be like a 45-minute segue. I guess we made a decision over the years to become more concise and focus on the audience a little bit more.” Depending on the crowd, stomping spazz-outs like “Woof and Warp” — with its circular toytown melody and shouts of “yeah, yeah yeah, yeah yeah” — are audience-friendly in their own way, but you can understand why most crowds might gravitate towards the ramshackle riffs and British Invasion-esque jagged energy of “Devil’s A-Go-Go.”

WHAT ABOUT THE NAME BLITZEN TRAPPER?
The rustic qualities of their name tempts some observers into overemphasizing any lingering backwoods flavour in the music itself, which Marquis (who is also a novelist) partly attributes to the liberty-taking press release he wrote for the album. The origin of the name is a story in itself. “Eric’s grandpa’s nickname was Trapper. He was a hillbilly musician from Arkansas who liked to go to the dump to see what he could find; he used to find animal skins and his family started calling him the trapper. And Eric thought he would pick that up and use it.”

…AND BLITZEN?
“I don’t know where that’s from. To me, it connotes lightning. It’s American music plugged in and turned up.” And one of Santa’s reindeer, a connotation that Marquis insists wasn’t on their minds. A dubious claim, but then, telling tall tales does sound like something a trapper would do.