Ladies and Gentlemen, take your seats and pray silence, please, for the new promo by director Orie Weeks for Blitzen Trapper and their blinding new single, ‘Wild Mountain Nation’.
Orie, formerly a gigging drummer, met the band Blitzen Trapper on the circuit in Portland Oregon. Although Orie’s fortunes took him off to the Art Institute of Portland, he remained good friends with the band.
Always a fan of Blitzen Trapper’s music, Orie decided to bring his new moving image skills back to the gig venues and started to film the band live. An interest in camera work soon saw Orie getting his teeth into editing and ‘image manipulation’, the results of which can be seen in this video. Orie sights Terry Gilliam as a huge influence, professing to having fallen in love with the surreal animation sections Gilliam realised during his Monty Python years. And this influence is abundantly obvious throughout this promo. Rye visual puns like the anvils with wings or members of the band playing on Saturn’s rings take me right back to my student days watching Python in a smoky West-Midlands living room.
Firstly, the track is an absolute belter. It really reminds me of Tom Petty and particularly his stint with The Travelling Wilburys. It’s infectious right from the first listen. Secondly, I’m absolutely enchanted by Orie’s work. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something so relaxed and yet so confident about this promo. His animations are naïve, which is a real breath of fresh air in this era of ‘Whizz-bang’. But his compositions are beautifully put together and take me from one place to the next in a totally un-forced way. You kind of come to the end of this promo feeling relaxed and happy, not like you’ve been dragged at light speed through someone’s entire bag of tricks. And I think that’s just it, it doesn’t feel like Orie is trying to impress us, he’s just inviting us along for the ride.