siLLy puPPy Hello kiddies! It’s time for another adventure at BUCKETHEAD’s funhouse nestled deep inside BUCKETHEADLAND! Mr Chicken Lover may have gone cuckoo and has even lost track of all these PIKE #’s. Yep there is still no PIKE 289, no 290 and no 295 but here in November of 2021 we do have PIKE 297 - FORK. Yeah, you know the shiny utensil that you stuff yer big fat face with. It also makes a great self-defense weapon but you have to be extremely crafty not to FORK yourself! Hehe

Many of the PIKEs have sounded quite similar lately but PIKE 297 is like a forkin’ time machine back to the wild raucous world of 1970s hard rock! Oh yeah, this PIKE of just over 30 minutes sounds a lot like an instrumental version of a Bon Scott era AC/DC album. While that is a nice break from the typical alt metal that the Chicken Lover has dished out over the course of 2021, it unfortunately sounds like one of those archival demo albums. Let’s face it. One of the main ingredients of a killa 70s hard rock band was the lead singer and here there’s NONE!

There are nine tracks all titled FORK with the #’s 1-9 to distinguish them. Tracks are short and to the point with only one exceeding four minutes. This is very primitive hard rock sounding more like early Free, Bad Company, UFO, Nazareth and of course early AC/DC. Nothing here is sophisticated in the vein of Led Zeppelin, The Who or Deep Purple and is pretty generic actually. The tracks pretty much run together in a continuous stream but due to the fact there is no charismatic front man hogging the attention, the whole thing sounds fairly repetitive. Ten minutes in and i’m already bored.

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some 70s hard rock. That was an excellent era of bluesy heavy rock music but this just seems to pointless. Instrumental rock at least needs some sort of lead instrument to add contrapuntal melodic developments. Listening to this is like listening to an incomplete album. This music is competent and sounds like it really could’ve existed in the 70s but doesn’t add anything creative to bring it into the modern world. Tracks like “Fork 5” are right out of the AC/DC playbook and almost sounds like “Have A Drink On Me.” After this i need a drink. Nah, this one i’m sure was fun to make but quite an uninteresting listening experience. Major yawn city here.