Portland, OR’s Blitzen Trapper go esoteric on their latest album, 100’s of 1,000’s, Millions of Billions, their second effort with their new lineup, taking inspiration from singer-songwriter Eric Earley’s devotion to Buddhist texts and meditation. The result is musically ambitious, often pretty, but a little heavy for any new listeners looking for a starting point to finally get into the band.
The title takes its name from a repeating phrase that appears in the Mahayana sutras. “This whole project grew out of a box of old four-track tapes from the ’90s that I found recently,” Earley explains. “The tapes were full of songs I’d written and recorded back when I was 19 or 20 years old, and the sound and the spirit of those recordings got me excited to start writing music again, to go back to working the way I did when I was first starting out.”
The dreamy opening track, “Ain’t Got Time to Fight,” is a perfect prelude for what follows. The music is impressively intricate, but the lyrics are as opaque as anything Michael Stipe sang about in the 80’s and 90’s. That’s not to say it’s not good – there are some solid songs here (like the album opener, the charming “Planetarium,” and the great “Long Game”), but there are also moments where it seems like simply being peculiar and enigmatic is the ultimate goal, like on “Hesher In The Rain” and “Bear’s Head/At The Cove.” Taking the album as a whole – from start to finish – it makes for an uneven listen.
Earley managed to find those old tapes that would serve as the backbone of this album around the same time he started to learn meditation and really dig into Buddhism. The effect feels like listening to a friend talk at length about a new discovery, and as happy as you are that it is bringing them joy, you cannot wait for the topic to switch to something you both care about.
