Buckethead: Monsters and Robots

Cyberoctave Records

Fifty-seven seconds into the CD is the first wack-off guitar solo—a barrage of notes so hastily excreted it's difficult to tell if this is “accomplished” playing or just that dude from the Boredoms making a racket again. Two minutes into that first song, a funk-metal jam supercedes a metal jam, and 26 seconds after that another wack-off solo emerges. A minute later we're onto track two, which begins with more wack-off guitar and is punctuated throughout with much the same. Like the worst offenders of the maligned prog-rock era, Buckethead songs are ultimately just fancy jams to drape fancy fretwork over.

That aside, Buckethead has a trump card that nearly all of his prog-rock forefathers lacked: He doesn't take himself too seriously. As evidence, witness his employment of two-thirds of prog-metal goofs Primus, and his proclivity for wearing KFC buckets for headgear when playing live. Buckethead also disarms those who prefer songs to solos by giving the nod to current musical trends—he's tangled with jungle by pitting notes per second against beats per minute with DJ Ninj, and now he's down with rap and electro-funk, peppering the whole shebang with weird, amusing samples. And the solos aren't all gratuitous: Listen to Bootsy Collins' drug-blurred ramblings on the nature of time in “Sow Thistle”—I'll be damned if that space-wacking robot guitar doesn't actually complement the tune. “Jowls” is traditional funk-metal spliced with freakish circus music breaks that'd make Zappa proud, while the metal guitar jams on “Nun Chuka Kata” and “The Shape Versus the Bucket” are salvaged with groovy, dope-ass beats. No songs appear here, but in this genre, that's fine. No one ever listened to Steve Vai for the songs either.

Guitar students at Julliard and Berkley take note. You may not have wasted the past few months while learning how not to rock—slap those bombastic runs on the right template and it can work.

—John Pecorelli

Alternative Press magazine