siLLy puPPy PIKE 212 - HORNET is the 111th album released by BUCKETHEAD in 2015 and yet another PIKE that is all instrumental, exclusively performed by BUCKETHEAD and clocks in near the half hour mark at 28 minutes and 13 seconds. There are five tracks all titled “Hornet” and they pretty much all run together creating a near half hour piece of music.

“Hornet Part 1” (5:28) starts off with a nice mellow echo guitar, background keyboard ambience and a popping percussion sound. It almost has a Christmas type of chord percussion that reminds me of the holiday spirit for some reason. This one has a strange little feel to it as it’s light and fluffy and the popping percussion makes me think of the soundtrack to inside a free energy noiseless popcorn popper! The time sigs are pretty straight forward but there are odd little breaks now and again that throws you off and gives a slightly weird feel.

The rest of the tracks pretty much run together so it’s not possible to tell where one ends and the other begins. “Hornet Part 2” pretty much just blends in seamlessly and slowly drifts into a different sounding track. This one still has a light and fluffy echoey guitar with more emphasis on the keyboard ambience which has become part of the music by now going through a series of notes. There are real drums as well as the popping percussion. Once again we feel like we’re drifting away on a cloud observing a huge fantasy world of landscape dominated by popcorn below.

While the album starts out very slow it does a good job at incrementally ratcheting up the temp and rock aspects of the sound. By the time we get to “Hornet Part 4” it sounds like a rocker albeit with the same echoey guitar, keyboard ambience and popping sound that have always been heard. It basically accrues different sounds as it progresses. The overall song structures are one of the weaknesses as it is a very repetitive riff that relies on an ever expanding palette of layering on new things. While this is a recipe for extreme ennui as evidenced on previous PIKES, i have to say that this one is a bit better than many of them with this formula. It has the right ingredients in the right balance and even the soaring lead guitar is tastefully incorporated. It is good but still lacks enough interesting ideas to be great.