BUCKETHEAD

Sean Cooper (courtesy of the All Music Guide by way of the Get Music website)

So far, Buckethead has released two quality albums: Bucketheadland and Giant Robot. Unfortunately, every band can suffer a bit from the problem of “That Difficult Third Album”. A lot of artists attempt to deviate from their formula and try something new. Many bands such as Weezer, From First To Last, Trivium, Billy Talent, The Used, My Chemical Romance, Coheed & Cambria, Avenged Sevenfold, Arsis, and a plethora of others have done this with varying degrees of success (or failure). This album was released in 1996. Can Buckethead deliver the goods for the third time in a row and live up the quality of his previous work?

Yes and no. For the most part, while being very diverse albums in their own right, Bucketheadland and Giant Robot had a very similar feel through the use of campy samples, guitar tone, and the fact that they both boast pretty large track listings. Day Of The Robot, on the other hand, is quite a departure from his previous works. The first thing you’ll notice is the fact that this album is made up of 5 longer songs instead of a multitude of generally shorter ones. The shortest song on this album is “Quantum Crash”, being just over six minutes. The longest is “Destroyer: Speed Flux Quadrant/Inclusion/Exhaust Release” which plays for over thirteen minutes.

An important thing to note about this album is that it sounds almost nothing like the last two. Day Of The Robot essentially sounds like a very weird rave album with some metal influences. While there are a lot of interesting things going on in the album, the song tend to drag after awhile due to their extended lengths. Day Of The Robot doesn’t exactly manage to be as good as the albums it’s following up but it manages to be a tolerable album in its own right.

As previously mentioned, Day Of The Robot has a lot of eccentric elements that we have not heard from Buckethead yet as this album really sounds like something you’d hear at a rave with a few sprinkles of Buckethead’s metal flavor. For example, “Flying Guillotine” has a lot of shuffling drum beats and quirky bass synths with brief sections of Buckethead’s distorted guitar. Album closer “Caution Drop” has a pretty awesome shred solo from Big B in the middle of the song. The album opener and longest song and song title on the album “Destroyer: Speed Flux Quadrant/Inclusion/Exhaust Release” comes out of left field by being more of a avant-garde metal song with a few good solos.

Unfortunately, while Day Of The Robot has some good elements, there are a lot of problems with it which could possibly deter listeners. Firstly, in “Destroyer: Speed Flux Quadrant/Inclusion/Exhaust Release” It feels like Buckethead stretched two slow riffs into about four and half minutes of the 13 minutes of this song. While the song’s ambient outro is interesting, it is around five minutes which is too long for it to stay very ear grabbing. Also, I feel like the following four songs feel rather similar. They all feature fast rave beats with bass synths. Not to mention that they also all feature ambient intros. They are cool songs on their own but it makes you feel like Buckethead didn’t put too much effort into the song writing when there are only differences with a handful of overdubs like pianos or some shredding which help to distinguish the songs in this rave mess.

Day Of The Robot definitely makes for a decent album. The new rave direction is pretty cool sounding and he injects his own personal flavor into it which can make it very enjoyable at times. However, I feel like he could have put more effort into making last four songs sound different from one another. The album can also get a little repetitive at times. Out of his three albums so far, this is probably Buckethead’s worst one. This by no means makes Day Of The Robot a bad album though because I think people will enjoy listening to this in small doses.

3 stars out of 5

Kronzo (courtesy of the Sputnik Music website)