BUCKETHEAD — Pike 273 - Guillotine Furnace (review)

BUCKETHEAD — Pike 273 - Guillotine Furnace album cover

Album · 2017 · Avant-garde Metal

4/5 · 2017-12-11
siLLy puPPy

For those of us who are actually keeping up with the prolific world of BUCKETHEAD, it is a chore indeed to keep up with his incessant flow of albums in the never-ending PIKE series but after his release of “Pike 272 - Coniunctio” at the end of August, 2017 there has been an unexpected multi-month silence from the chicken lover most likely due to a touring schedule where i finally got to see dude in a live setting. While 2017 will not come anywhere close to his million albums of 2015, finally in December, BH releases his 30th album of the year

PIKE 273 - GUILLOTINE FURNACE. This is another one of those albums where every track has the title of the album only with an added “Part 1” all the way up to “Part 8.” And like the majority of these types of albums, all these parts are really just, well, parts of a much longer track that takes up the whole album that clocks in at 28 minutes and 3 seconds but each “part” is really just snippets of smaller “parts” so in effect this is basically a bizarre display of surreality in full avant-garde mode

“Part 1” starts things off with a clucking keyboard part before a little solo erupts and gives way to a barrage of riffs interrupted periodically by electronic noises of various sorts. Sometimes these can deviate into pure ambient passages that totally shifts the mood into another musical universe. After a few of these it’s apparent that this is one of those albums that shifts around from different styles willy nilly with no rhyme or reason. The initial guitar riffs pop in from time to time to remind you that the music no longer resides there but then it bounces around from funk to post-rock to blues rock and so forth

As “Part 2” begins it shifts from the bombastic soling that the previous track exited with and provides a serene ambient soundscape before erupting into alternative metal, industrial metal and some sort of avant-garde funk metal that is followed by good old fashioned funk for a while and then more riffing. Things change it up often and quickly as one style sticks around for a short time and then is replaced by another. Sometimes being weird electronically tinged funk and at other times being face-melting solos over bluesy metal. It only gets weirder and wilder with more disparate genre styles and experimental features peeking in and out of the incessant parade of changing-it-up

While “Part 3” begins with a processed funky bass followed by an eruption of guitar virtuosity, it becomes apparent that i would have to write a million word review to catalogue every single style shift that occurs with this one so in short, there’s no need to chronicle this wickedly wild roller coaster ride into the avant-garde. This is one that is best experienced to believe as it’s just too fertile and ambitious for words to convey. Just expect a wild ride where nothing stays same for long. The melodies change, the dynamics change, the tempos, the genres, the rhythms, the instruments, the time signatures, they all change it up and often

This is not the first style of eclectic excess that BH has done in this fashion but it remains one of my favorite types of albums where absolutely anything goes and the only constant is the unexpected. Another renegade egg has hatched and is growing up quickly into a beastly monster that cannot be contained. Be warned. This is really a musical trojan horse trying to take control of our brains. Oh my, i suddenly feel the urge to drive to the country and hang out with chickens. Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!