365 DAYS TIL HALLOWEEN: SMASH

PIKE 207 - 365 DAYS TIL HALLOWEEN: SMASH is the 106th album released by BUCKETHEAD in 2015. This is a joke right? We just completed the 31 day countdown to HALLOWEEN and the odometer is set to count it down again?!!! Only this time 365 DAYS? Yikes. Another all instrumental album with BUCKETHEAD playing every little thing heard and unlike many PIKES that pretend to have several tracks that in reality are one, this just says it's one long track called "Smash." It clocks in twenty-seven seconds over the thirty minute mark.

This album starts off with a piano playing the same note over and over and then is joined in by ambience. The piano continues and slowly adds more notes. It is echoey and creepy. I thought HALLOWEEN was over but we get a post-party here on November 1st. The ambient sounds in the background include a drone type of ambience that slowly changes pitch up and then slowly descends. Other noises appear unexpectedly, even an organ. Everything is always highly reverberated and echoey. It sounds just as creepy as any of the countdown to HALLOWEEN albums but not quite as satisfying as the the cream of the crop.

This is another very strange dark ambient album that sustains the drone ambiance but all kinds of sounds come and go. It is a decent post-HALLOWEEN haunting and i feel like i'm transported to the Moguicheng desert section of Xinjiang in China which is known as the City Of Satan where reports of strange occurrences are frequent for those who dare enter its vicinity. PIKE 207 may technically be the day after HALLOWEEN but this one is as mysterious and spooky as anything that led up to it. It does not however have enough variety to be considered excellent.