siLLy puPPy
BUCKETHEAD - PIKE 50 - PITCH DARK
9th album out of 60 in 2014 and 80th overall
All sounds brought to you by Buckethead and all instrumental
This one has 3 tracks that clock in at 29:58
“Pitch Dark” (12:42) begins slow and mellow with a clean somewhat echoey guitar riff, bass and drums. As it continues i’m realizing this is yet another one of those overlong mellow tracks that repeats the same riff promoting the kind of apeirophobia (fear of infinity) that only BUCKETHEAD can dish out with these boring and rather pointless types of tracks. How many of these sorts of albums need to be made? While a few like “Electric Tears” were actually brilliant in how they were constructed, this just loops like a record that skips. Yeah, there’s subtle variations and it does pick up a bit at the end with bluesy solos and all but there’s just not enough to ever want to hear this again :(
“Drifting Ice” (8:03) begins with clean guitar parts, bass and drums on slow speed. This one is more echoey and the guitar lick part is semi-distorted. This one is a little more melancholy in its sound. Well, as feared this is as exciting as “Drifting Ice.” It glaciates its meandering melodic recurrences with frosty guitar licks superimposed upon them. This is another one we’ve all heard a million times before as just like a piece of ice floating randomly on a mountain lake takes its sweet time to go nowhere. Yawn
“Water Drops” (9:13) is yet another placid, inoffensive piece of easy listening with clean guitar riff, bass and drums. Slightly different melodic development than the rest but same overall song structure. It has the same echoey guitar which is nice and the tones are quite pleasing but once again we’re given a recycled pile of goods. There have been so many tracks like this on previous PIKEs i’ve lost track. BH has proven he can create beautiful mellow tracks just as awesomely as his heavy metal rockers but when he’s on automatic pilot he just pumps out one recycled piece of filler after another.
Another complete of a dud for an album. Nothing on here is remotely original, interesting or worth the time of day unless you simply can’t get enough of this formula and long for another release of it. Not me