My son and I get strange looks from people when we tell them one of our favorite guitar players wears a mask and a KFC Bucket on his head, except of course from those people who know and love Buckethead.
Brian Carroll known by his alias Buckethead is an incredibly prolific and incredibly talented guitar player. He cannot be categorized into a genre. In the dozen albums I have by him thus far, I have heard classical guitar, smooth jazz, avante garde, new age, techno/trance, hard rock, alternative and heavy metal. Sometimes all that on the same album!
The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell was the 13th studio album released by Buckethead. It came out in 2004. If I had to assign it to a genre I would call it heavy metal jazz. If Coltrane, Monk and Miles grew up in the 80s and were metal heads, this album approximates what they might have played had they chosen guitars, drums and bass instead of sax, piano and trumpet. Freeform jazz expression meets death metal. Don't believe me? Give this album a listen, and give me YOUR Thoughts on how to desribe the free flowing metal madness contained in the 17 tracks.
The Songs
Descent of the Damned/Spokes for the Wheels of Torment/Arc of the Pendulum/Fountains of the Forgotten/The Treeman/Pylegathon/Traveling Morgue/One Tooth of the Time Train/Bedlam's Bluff/Beaten with Sledges/Woods of Suicides/Yellow Hide/Moths to Flame/The Ravines of Falsehood/The Black Forest/Haven of Black Tar Pitch/The Escape Wheel
Rather than attempt to describe all 17 tracks, I will describe a few of the above tracks in detail. Descent of the Damned begins appropriately enough with the ticking of a cuckoo clock and then the sound of the cuckoo. Some vague sounds come and then a blast beat from drum, and a few rapidly placed power chords. A crazed bass line comes in, and then some more chords crash in wildly modulated wahhh wahhh. In the middle somewhere is one of Buckethead's insanely fast 'robot' style guitar solos. I call it robot style because when he plays the notes it sounds like the rapid fire stacatto chirps of some robotic language. The instruments all play off each other in a free form expression that I would best describe as a jazz version of death metal. There are no lyrics in any of the songs. There are also no catchy hooks that one can wrap their ears around.
Spokes for the Wheels of Torments sort of flows from the last song. A quick lead is soon joined by a crazed sounding bass and drum line. Very crunchy sounding power chords then come in rapid fire. The song stops and then two instruments talk to each other. The number ends with a call and response style of communique between the guitars, the bass and the drums. All have a very heavy, very distorted sound. No clean tones were used in the making of this album.
Fountains of the Forgotten starts off with some nice heavy drumming with a guitar solo full of bends with a blues from hell sort of sound. The bass solo slaps through many parts of the song in full distortion mode.
The album just continues in this vein with crazed drums, bass and guitar riffs and solos coming at you. There are snippets of melodies here and there, but the songs don't seem to have any particular structure or theme. On occasion things sound very discordant, on other occasions everything works beautifully. For me, it was a most interesting experimental album.
Band Lineup
Buckethead did all the guitars and all the bass on this album.
Brian "Brian" Mantia did the drumming, he has collaborated on other Buckethead albums as well as drumming for Primus, Tom Waits and Guns n Roses.
Summary
Cuckoo Clocks of Hell is the heavy metal version of early Pink Floyd songs like Astronomy Domine. It is free form expression like Miles Davis - 8itches Brew or late Coltrane albums. Like those avant garde pieces, listeners will either decry this as madness or declare this as brilliant! Although I didn't quite think the album was "excellent" I gave it four stars. My recommendation only applies to Buckethead fans and the open minded. Others may run screaming.
Buckethead fans may also want to check out:
Monsters and Robots
Chicken Noodles
Population Override
Decoding the Tomb of Bansheebot
Acoustic Shards
Cobra Strike The 13th Scroll
Enter the Chicken
and Dreamatorium (under his other pseudonym Death Cube K)
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