siLLy puPPy Hot on the heels of “Pike 300 - Quarry,” comes PIKE 301 - THE CHARIOT OF SATURN officially hatched on 18 December 2021. It still remains a mystery as to what happened to Pikes #s 285, 286, 289, 290 and 295 since they’re missing from the queue. WTF, BUCKETHEAD?

This one features one long track called THE CHARIOT OF SATURN which shape shifts through mellow clean guitar passages to mid-tempo rock. Not unlike umpteen similar sounding PIKEs this one pretty much sticks to the chicken lover playbook that now has been established without any significant deviation.

Overall this one track offering hovers around in an echoey guitar ambient mode. The basically melodic development is consistent and the track sort of oozes as it unfolds with even the rock aspects barely catching fire. There is a lot of attention paid to the production these days and while it’s not always essential on THE CHARIOT OF SATURN it really does make a difference.

This is a rather dreamy PIKE with the emphasis much more on the ambient atmospheric effects rather than the guitar playing. Luckily this isn’t one of those lullaby PIKEs though and there are enough dynamic shifts to keep the old attention span firing on all pistons.

Like most of these single track PIKEs this one features cyclical loops and repetitive motifs and doesn’t really need to be as long as it is however if you are listening to this as background music while surfing the web or some other activity it’s perfectly adequate. This one is better than recent PIKEs but nothing really new or outstanding either. Just another day at BUCKETHEADLAND.