Portland natives Blitzen Trapper have always enjoyed blurring the lines between their own unique experimentation and what their traditionalist contemporaries might consider musical schizophrenia. With Wild Mountain Nation, their self-released follow-up to their 2004 release Field Rexx, these grizzlies takes their mish mash of mountain-man bluegrass, country, and outer-space electronics to a new, messy level of weird.

Like Jackson Pollack, the band generates a sound that is clearly inspired by the moment. Sometimes this artistic looseness demonstrates itself to be a fairly successful means of song writing, as with Wild Mountain Nation’s title track, a cruising Lynyrd Skynyrd twanger that grooves along a prominent slide guitar.

It even brings out the album’s best song, “Country Caravan,” a campfire jamboree that begs for a stomping sing-along. Other times it yields results like the bizarre “Woof & Warp Of The Quiet Giant’s Hem,” a jumbled chaos of distorted riffs, vocal yeah-yeah-yeahs, and animal howling that just seems like a noisy waste of good four-track production tape.

Listening to Blitzen Trapper is like listening to a conversation with a crazy, old prospector who’s finally decided to come down off the mountainside. Though he’s got a few nuggets of gold in his pocket, you can’t deny there’s something mighty strange about him.

- Mike Hilleary
Blitzen Trapper