A REAL DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

A Real Diamond in the Rough!

After reading a super cool review in these pages about this 2009 "A Real Diamond in the Rough" one of the zillion releases in BUCKETHEAD's discography and my early acquaintance with lots of his works and the luck of owning a couple of my personal favorites (which I have reviewed also in these pages), well, I got caught.

A true to life stardom surrounds this anti-stardom composer/performer. As if to ellaborate on this maybe his virtuous skills, the same his detachment, his heartfelt and intelligent compositions the sum of all parts and yet something intangible is present as in his best releases.

Non-stop creativity guided by a totally inspired composer/guitarist aided by Dan Monti on drum programming and bass and Bryan "Brain" Mantia on drums also and 13 tracks to prove it, which adds up to BUCKETHEAD's genius like albums.

The routes traveled are diverse, all BUCKETHEAD imprinted as expected. From classical Rock to proto/prog moods to classic like progressions to blues rooted sections to latin based rhythms to magnificent acoustic guitar only structures to clean cut Jazz swings to the experimental borders of sound engineering and to wherever the roads may lead.

The obssesive attention to detail throughout the whole album is simply remarkable.

****4 PA stars.

With the release of his 24th album and 2nd of 2009, BUCKETHEAD dedicated this one to his legal representative Stan Diamond and thus is titled A REAL DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH. Yet another album with BUCKETHEAD handling guitar duties, Bryan "Brain" Mantia on drums and Dan Monti on bass. He also handles the drum programming on some tracks. Like many of his "tribute" albums, this one is a warm sentimental collection of tracks that focus on emotion inducing stripped down melodies that are calm and reflective rather than bombastic and experimental. The album is much like earlier albums "Colma" or "Electric Tears" that take a journey into the placidity of atmospheric melodic tracks. Unlike those there a few upbeat guitar parts with heavy distortion and more energetic riffing. The production is crystal clear.

Tracks like "Dawn Appears" are as slowed down and ambient as the name suggests and have clean guitar parts, snail's-paced tempo and very melodic developments. Others like "Separate Sky" offer more variables that add greater dynamics including more rocking out and fuzzed out feedback. "Sundial" is a nice peppy series of popping echoey guitar lines that without percussion creates an interesting effect for its short duration. "Squid Ink" relies as much on the heft of percussion as it does on the ultra clean textures of the guitar riffs and clean production techniques. "Formless Present" takes the slowing down to the ultimate level providing a sample of slow core guitar riffing while "The Return Of Captain EO" takes on a heavy bluesy rock style.

For the most part A REAL DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH is could hardly be called a rock album at all and focuses on chilled out clean guitar oriented tracks that slowly mediate rather than pulverize. There are nice tracks to be heard on this one but for me there are too many slower tracks that sound as if they could've been leftovers for previous albums of the similar style and even when BH rocks out, it feels purposefully held back. On top of that the album doesn't flow to my liking as the placement of certain tracks doesn't make sense in the big scheme of things. Fans of BH's mellower albums will probably dig this more than i do and as i stated, there is plenty of decent material here but there also seems to be a lot of recycling going on in the creativity department as well.