(2020) Blitzen Trapper - Holy Smokes Future Jokes


Review:
Singer-songwriters have been tackling existential questions about life and death since time immemorial… or at least the 1960s. But when it came to Blitzen Trapper’s newest album, Holy Smokes Future Jokes, front man Eric Earley looked beyond mere existence-or even the end of it-to contend with grander cosmic explorations: namely, the intermediate period between a person’s separate lives on earth, “and what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth,” he explains. Inspired by George Saunders’ 2017 experimental tome, Lincoln in the Bardo and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Earley’s lyrics take the listener on a wild and dramatic journey through rivers of waist-high water in the aftermath of a tragic car wreck and the hazy morning before a murderous moment and from getting blitzed to the point of extinction inside a masonic temple to a stop for chips and dip before the apocalypse. Along the way, there’s also an occasion to smoke dope with Abe Lincoln and play bones with Brian Jones, slide through the ether in a dream, and confront the Intermediate States while bathed in the glow of the bardo’s light – that transitional state between death and rebirth.





Tracklist:
01. Baptismal
02. Bardo's Light (Ouija, Ouija)
03. Don't Let Me Run
04. Magical Thinking
05. Masonic Temple Microdose #1
06. Requiem
07. Holy Smokes Future Jokes
08. Sons and Unwed Mothers
09. Dead Billie Jean
10. Hazy Morning


Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits