PIKE DOORS

Curious of what this Buckethead guy is up to, I chose one of the recent Pikes that got four stars by siLLy puPPy to give it two full runs and write about it, so just to have one more voice commenting on one of his albums. It's generally not fair to review an album after only having listened to it twice but on the other hand Buckethead himself can't listen to every single one more often given how many of them he chunks out, so I kind of treat him as he treats us and my conscious is not so bad after all.

The first thing I can testify is that siLLy puPPy wrote a hugely informative review and if you want a description of the music, you can trust him well. Indeed there are strong Pink Floyd vibes on this one and a very David Gilmour-like sounding guitar. Door One is rather calm, spacey and dreamy, Door Two has heavy solid drums and a classic rock sounding guitar, and Door Three is somewhere in between, very short, but it feels more composed and somewhat less improvised than the others. It also has intensity contrasts which you don't really find on the other two. It ends very suddenly, probably Buckethead had used up his time budget for the day in making a new album.

On the positive side, all of this is tasteful and good to listen to, particularly for fans of Pink Floyd-like relaxing guitar oriented music. Then it has very, very good and fast guitar playing; you've got to give this to the guy.

So you'll feel very comfortable and well cared for listening to this in the background. The thing is just, if you feel like really listening to music as the main thing to do and you're yearning for some appealing ideas and some thought through composition, there is so much more music out there you could spend your time with in a better way. Essentially nothing much happens on this album, apart from good guitar soloing in three to five different moods. The key hardly ever changes, and the background to the lead guitar is OK but basically goes on and on and on without doing anything interesting. Where's the beef?

Lots of young amateur musicians would be proud being able to play something like this and even a good band could think they had a good day in the studio having compiled 30 minutes like this out of two or three jams. None of this, though, would finally make it on one of their albums, or only one or two licks, put in different surrounding, if they let their album grow over months or even one or two years, because good music can do with some time for maturing, and Buckethead doesn't give it that.

So at the end of the day it's what one could expect from a great guitarist who does about one album in two days. Not a bad experience, but nothing worthwhile to come back to, either.