MMMM mmmmm Good, soup is good food. Buckethead is a good guitar player. Chicken Noodles is the Buckethead album with the Andy Warhol style soup can on the front cover. The album features the music of Buckethead and Travis Dickerson.

The Artists

As stated on the soup can on the inside liner:

Buckethead plays the Telecaster

Travis Dickerson plays the Rhoades

(that's a Fender Telecaster guitar and Fender Rhoades keyboard)

We learn nothing else of the album in the sparse liner notes. It was released in 2006, and I did learn from Wikipedia that the album was inspired by one track from Population Override titled The Cruel Reality of Nature.

The Songs

Only four songs are featured on this album, but the shortest is 8:24.

The songs are:

Enter Tomorrow 13:07
Loss from a Distance 18:01
Sorrow of Discord 11:28
False Directions 8:24

So, What's it all About?

If any of you follow Buckethead, you will know that his albums are anything but the same. This album is a melodic relaxing instrumental album. Buckethead is quite mellow here, and the Telecaster sounds like a smooth jazz guitar on this album. The speed and staccato attack present on some Buckethead albums is not here, this is mellow stuff. Despite just having two instruments on this album and no vocals, it is interesting music to listen to, but I find it more of a background easy listening music than crank up and listen to the shred music.

It is hard to describe long instrumentals, but I will try to make some comparisons to give you an idea. On the opening track, Dickerson's Fender Rhodes reminds me a lot of the keyboards used in Led Zeppelin's No Quarter. It has that moody vibratron sort of feel to it. Although Buckethead imitates no one, if I had to compare him to another guitar player, on this album I would say Al DiMeola or Pat Matheny come to mind. The amplifier setting on Bucketheads Telecaster here sounds to me like a nice clean tube driven sound with just a hint of reverb. No distortion or elaborate effects are present on this album.

When to Listen

This, like many of my jazz albums is ideal music to listen to when you are going to sleep or just want to mellow out.

Summary

This isn't one of my favorite Buckethead albums, but I found it quite relaxing. The guitar playing is great, I didn't give it five stars because the music here just isn't quite as interesting as on many of his other albums. Nevertheless anything I've heard by Buckethead to date is certainly above average, and Chicken Noodles is no exception.

Recommend this product?