image via flickr user rollertrain

Did I want to like Blitzen Trapper, on walking in to the Crocodile Friday night, because I had developed an instant crush on singer Eric Earley? Maybe, but having crush on band members for the duration of the set is one of the benefits of going to shows, and there are lots of bands with excellent live shows whose members I don’t want to bring home with me. Mostly I wondered if their vaunted genre hopping works in person.

Their latest album, Wild Mountain Nation, is full of hooks, but it just hasn’t grabbed me yet. Live, though, the band sometimes sounds fully southern, like what I want to hear upstairs in bars in Nashville, and sometimes like they’re about to start singing about robots. Pretty much immediately I decided that I wanted to keep them in a box to play for all of my road trips and any glam-rock hoedowns I come across.

But segueing between songs with too much noise is not always a good thing–it works on the album but making so much noise I can’t hear my ears when I’ve been having such fun is just going to make me mad. It derails the good time, although it is a tribute to their confidence and charm that I was annoyed only long enough for them to swing into the next song.

Perhaps the main draw of Blitzen Trapper on stage is that they don’t care if the audience is scowling at them or smiling. They’re doing what they’ve been doing all along for the last three albums, which is whatever they feel like, and at their own pace. And as long as they’re having fun, it’s all worthwhile. I imagine that we haven’t heard anywhere near the last of these guys.