PIKE DOORS

PIKE 217 - PIKE DOORS is the 116th album released by BUCKETHEAD in 2015 which is another all instrumental album exclusively played by BUCKETHEAD. The album dons one of my favorite PIKE album covers with a creepy BUCKETHEAD passing through a hall of doors. Ooooo. Scary! This one clocks in at 30:28 and has three tracks called "Door."

"Door One" (17:40) shows this album as one of those slow and ambient releases. It has a dominant ambient synthesizer utilizing some thick atmosphere while a guitar gently plucks and strums and echoes and caresses treble notes. This one has a melodic development although it's slow in its unraveling. This track alone is about 2/3 of the album so it has plenty of time to take its time. Approaching the four minute mark the mood suddenly changes with a highly melodic guitar lick taking the stage and steering the musical development accompanied by tribal drumming percussion. The melody is pretty catchy, one of the most so i've heard of these PIKEs and has a very Pink Floydian type of space rock delivery. If i didn't know any better i'd swear Roger Waters was joining in! I have to admit that most of the time these slow jams just don't do it for me but so catchy this one is with its perfect balance of space rock guitar, background ambience and hand drums that i'm totally hypnotized by its beauty. There is life after the Halloween countdown! Why'd it take so friggin' long?!!!

"Door Two" (10:03) starts out a little rougher with power chords strutting alternating with silence and then joined in by a lead guitar. All is mid-tempo at first but picks up the pace a little bit with more distortion in the rhythm guitars, slightly faster lead guitar and a regular rock bass and drum combo. While this track is much more rockin' it still maintains the space rock vibe of the first track only this clearly crosses over into space metal territory with its intensity. The solos can get blistering and quite fast. The solos go on for many minutes to the end but unlike many of the past ones i actually find this one works for some reason.

"Door Three" (2:45) starts out somewhere in between the pace of the other two tracks. Not as slow as the first and not as fast as the second. It has an echoey guitar that gets joined by a bass and drums and eventually lead guitar lick. Once again the melody is addictive with tastiness afoot, cool guitar riffs, excellent shredding skills and a melodic development that puts the most recent PIKEs to shame. This is one that ends too soon and i actually want more! That hasn't happened in a while!

This is a great return to form. The melodies on this one make this a special one that actually deserves 4 stars. I just wish more of them were like this. When BUCKETHEAD misses, he misses badly but when he hits the target there is nothing better. Bullseye with this little gem.

Curious of what this Buckethead guy is up to, I chose one of the recent Pikes that got four stars by siLLy puPPy to give it two full runs and write about it, so just to have one more voice commenting on one of his albums. It's generally not fair to review an album after only having listened to it twice but on the other hand Buckethead himself can't listen to every single one more often given how many of them he chunks out, so I kind of treat him as he treats us and my conscious is not so bad after all.

The first thing I can testify is that siLLy puPPy wrote a hugely informative review and if you want a description of the music, you can trust him well. Indeed there are strong Pink Floyd vibes on this one and a very David Gilmour-like sounding guitar. Door One is rather calm, spacey and dreamy, Door Two has heavy solid drums and a classic rock sounding guitar, and Door Three is somewhere in between, very short, but it feels more composed and somewhat less improvised than the others. It also has intensity contrasts which you don't really find on the other two. It ends very suddenly, probably Buckethead had used up his time budget for the day in making a new album.

On the positive side, all of this is tasteful and good to listen to, particularly for fans of Pink Floyd-like relaxing guitar oriented music. Then it has very, very good and fast guitar playing; you've got to give this to the guy.

So you'll feel very comfortable and well cared for listening to this in the background. The thing is just, if you feel like really listening to music as the main thing to do and you're yearning for some appealing ideas and some thought through composition, there is so much more music out there you could spend your time with in a better way. Essentially nothing much happens on this album, apart from good guitar soloing in three to five different moods. The key hardly ever changes, and the background to the lead guitar is OK but basically goes on and on and on without doing anything interesting. Where's the beef?

Lots of young amateur musicians would be proud being able to play something like this and even a good band could think they had a good day in the studio having compiled 30 minutes like this out of two or three jams. None of this, though, would finally make it on one of their albums, or only one or two licks, put in different surrounding, if they let their album grow over months or even one or two years, because good music can do with some time for maturing, and Buckethead doesn't give it that.

So at the end of the day it's what one could expect from a great guitarist who does about one album in two days. Not a bad experience, but nothing worthwhile to come back to, either.