Blitzen Trapper: "Black River Killer"

Before there was Man on Wire (2008), documentary filmmaker James Marsh shot the bone-chilling Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)—a slide show based around Black River Falls and its turn-of-the-century spookiness. Essentially a stream of century-old photographs set to a skin-crawling Ian Holm narration, the film showcased the spontaneous mayhem that befell the town one dark decade: asylums were bursting, housewives turned violent, and Hell seemed to gradually seep upward. Batches of dynamite were going astray and the only steady hand in town was the cameraman. Thank God he maintained a suitable distance to escape the village-wide pull of the underworld.

Blitzen Trapper, the plaid-clad sextet from between the trees of Portland, seem to have siphoned some of that Hell off for themselves, breathing it back into this opening primer for their Black River Killer EP (itself a throwback to last year’s Furr; Russian Doll tactics gone loco). In a frisky but unashamedly traumatised mood, the Trappers relate a fictional yarn of the wanderings of a freed criminal, hacking his way back up to Oregon in search of a little self-esteem/closure. He finds it—where else—in the sinister eddies of the title, and goes about scrubbing the clichés from his hands like the end of A History Of Violence. “I’m pure,” smiles his reflection from the gleaming reeds, pausing only to sharpen his blood-stained blades and return to the campaign of slaughter. We’ve definitely got a live one here, and the twist is that BT write melodies as sharp as their storytelling. “Black River Killer” is in all likelihood destined to infect anyone with hang-ups and earphones; the fucks who see violence as a dance. Its hip country goose-step belies the taut carnage at its heart—a butchered girl whose “mouth was sewn shut but her eyes were still wide”—and vocalist Erik Early unrolls his tale like leadshot spat from warm rabbit meat. His oat-fed hillbilly rap could even be coy if it weren’t quite so streetwise, and you can almost feel the Johnny Cash Estate consider a posthumous Tupac-like overdub. I think we can expect some interesting things come the next full LP from Blitzen. They could move into more latent black humour if they hired a backing singer called Donna.