ALONG THE RIVER BANK

PIKE 125 - ALONG THE RIVER BANK is the 24th album released by BUCKETHEAD in 2015. This one has six tracks and the total time clocks in at 29:44. Once again all are instrumentals and all musical duties are handled by BUCKETHEAD himself.

Well, i'm onto this chicken lover's game. After the extremely avant-garde and surprisingly adventurous "Pike 124 - Rotten Candy Candy" we get a more relaxed and "normal" sounding album. It starts out with that nice relaxing "Colma" sound which immediately makes me wanna throw the one star bomb, but after a while the beginning title track becomes a slow rocker, however after the wild and experimental of the previous album this one sounds almost too tame but yet it has a nice alternative metal kind of sound to it despite not being so different from other PIKES. Other than the 11:48 title track (which wears out its welcome) the others are quite short by PIKE standards all being less than five minutes.

"Mind Train" picks up the tempo a bit but is basically an instrumental metal rocker that has a riff or two then repeats with some melodic soloing here and there. Meh.

"View Masters" is something different. Kind of an electronically manipulated funk riff starts it out and then a more grungy oddly timed riff takes over. There seems to be a trade off between these ideas with a few riff changes that include electronic freakiness and guitar solos. It ends as very melodic metal reminding me of shredders like Marty Friedman and other neoclassical axe masters. This one's pretty cool.

"All Ashore" is thrashy groove metal with an energized riff that trades off with some soloing. Kinda reminds me a bit of White Zombie in the riff department. Not bad.

"Starboard Bow" is a thrashy one with a weird little time sig riff. It alternates with solos and other more straight forward thrash riffs. Great energetic soloing ending. This one is pretty cool actually.

"Shell" is a 1:34 boring rocker.

There are a lot of progressive riffs and ideas on this release but there is also a lot of meh. When it's hot it's real hot but unfortunately most of the time?? it's not. 2.5 rounded down