Blitzen Trapper – 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Blitzen Trapper – 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:13 minutes | 801 MB | Genre: Indie Folk, Indie Rock, Psychedelic Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Yep Roc Records

Inspired by the Buddhist sutras, Blitzen Trapper’s radiant new album, 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions, offers a captivating take on rebirth and transcendence, navigating its way through the space beyond dreams and reality, beyond gods and mortals, beyond life and death. The songs here are as sincere as they are surreal, rooted in rich character studies and deep reflection, and the production is intoxicating to match, blending lo-fi intimacy and trippy psychedelia into a mesmerizing swirl of analog and electronic sounds. Add it all together and you’ve got a gorgeous collection of stripped-down bedroom folk wrapped in lush layers of synthesizers and washed out electric guitars, a poignant, expansive exploration of perception and purpose that manages to look both forwards and backwards all at once.

Launched roughly two decades ago in Portland, OR, Blitzen Trapper broke out internationally with 2008’s Furr, which cemented their status at the forefront of the modern indie folk revival. Rolling Stone hailed the band’s “hazy, psychedelic Americana,” while NPR praised their “explosive live performances and infectious roots-rock swagger.” Dates with Fleet Foxes, Wilco, and Dawes followed, as did festival appearances at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk, and Coachella, among others. The band would go on to release six more similarly lauded studio albums, culminating with 2020’s Holy Smokes Future Jokes, which Mojo proclaimed “sound[s] like the Beatles at Big Pink.”Blitzen Trapper had a good run. From their early beginnings as a trippy and somewhat unfocused psychedelic band through their 2007/2008 critical and commercial peak with the energetic, jammy indie-folk of Wild Mountain Nation and Furr, and into the comfortable, slightly quirky take on dad-rock they played up through the time the original lineup split in 2019, the Portland, Oregon, group notched an impressive, two-decade career. And now, they’re having another good run. Bandleader Eric Earley resuscitated the Blitzen Trapper moniker in 2020 for Holy Smokes Future Jokes, which was essentially a solo album with contributions from studio players and former band members. That record’s warm spaciousness—a sort of crunchy-granola gentility that walked right up to the line of acoustic psychedelia—was clearly in the same universe as Blitzen Trapper’s late-period work, but it was also notably quite a bit more consistently mellow than the band had been in the past. That approach continues with 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions, an album that continues to move this version of Blitzen Trapper (which is now Earley, longtime BT drummer Brian Koch, along with newer members Michael Elson and Nathan Vanderpool) forward on a new path. While it occasionally buzzes with some of the band’s early energy (most notably on the bouncy “Hello Hallelujah”), the record largely explores a more ruminative vibe. Earley apparently found twin inspiration from both his recent studies of Buddhism and his exploration of some old homemade cassettes of songs he had written before the first incarnations of Blitzen Trapper. That collision of the emotional intensity of youth and the spiritual peacefulness of middle age provides a bit of tension throughout the record, but, mostly, 100’s of 1000’s keeps in a solid midtempo lane of warm, analog wistfulness. Thus, you get a track like “Cosmic Backseat Education” that manages to combine echo-ey piano balladry with rearview mirror teen angst, or the sensitive acoustic soft rock of “View From Jackson Hill” that seems nostalgic, but is actually painting a vivid picture of emotional struggle. It’s a decidedly mature album—ironic considering the original source of inspiration behind many of the songs, especially one like “Hesher in the Rain”—and while Earley’s fascination with Buddhism sometimes gets a little on the nose (“Upon the Chain”), the essence of that spiritual searching is vital to what makes this record’s textures so impactful and enveloping. – Jason Ferguson

Tracklist:

1-01. Blitzen Trapper – Ain’t Got Time to Fight (03:30)
1-02. Blitzen Trapper – Dead God of the Green Arising (02:31)
1-03. Blitzen Trapper – Cosmic Backseat Education (03:19)
1-04. Blitzen Trapper – Hesher in the Rain (03:24)
1-05. Blitzen Trapper – Cheap Fantastical Takedown (03:37)
1-06. Blitzen Trapper – So Divine (02:11)
1-07. Blitzen Trapper – Planetarium (03:54)
1-08. Blitzen Trapper – Hello Hallelujah (02:44)
1-09. Blitzen Trapper – Long Game (03:20)
1-10. Blitzen Trapper – View from Jackson Hill (02:22)
1-11. Blitzen Trapper – Upon the Chain (02:49)
1-12. Blitzen Trapper – Bear’s Head/At the Cove (05:27)

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