Avant-garde guitarist, Buckethead continues to release a prolific amount of amazing music. In addition to playing with artists such as Guns 'n' Roses, Viggo Mortensen, Les Claypool, Bootsy Collins, The Deli Creeps, Thantopsis, and Gorgone and contributing his sound to movie soundtracks and video games such as Guitar Hero, Buckethead has to his name an accomplished 28 solo albums.
This achievement presents to Buckethead newcomers the task of having to sift through a considerable of amount of material.
Spanning Sound and Genre
Buckethead transcends specific genre by experimenting with a range of sounds and styles, including, though not limited to, classical, pop, jazz/funk, rock, shred, and electronic/dance. However, out of the musical amalgam, arises a specific and unique, wordless voice that marks him as a true and noteworthy artist.
Perhaps Buckethead's music should simply be labeled "guitar music" because its broadness of scope continues to expand. Recording after recording, he deftly manipulates metal strings and electricity, creating strange and sonorous sounds that blend in waves from serenity to insanity. From album to album, and oftentimes within single songs, melodically and rhythmically, with nuance and preternatural technique, he effortlessly shifts through a catalog of styles with a sort of schizophrenic genius, like audible chaos theory, harmony, dissonance, grace, and destruction, coalesced.
The Buckethead Album List
Unique and incomparable, each of Buckethead's albums present something new. These listed albums demonstrate classic Buckethead sound, technique, and composition style.
- Slaughterhouse on the Prairie (2009)
- Decoding the Tomb of Bansheebot (2008)
- Crime Slunk Scene (2006)
- Elephant Man's Alarm Clock (2006)
- The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell (2004)
One of Buckethead's 2009 releases, Slaughterhouse on the Prairie, a hard rock-based album, includes several great tracks, beginning with an amazing song, "Lebron," dedicated to basketball phenom, Lebron James. Also rock-based, Decoding the Tomb of Bansheebot contains many sharp, focused songs ("Asylum of Glass," "Ghost Host," "Killing Cone," "Stretching Lighthouse") that refrain from wandering off into tangents of dissonance (a common Buckethead technique).
Crime Slunk Scene offers a more electronic sound and demonstrates Buckethead's mastery of the whammy pedal. It includes an array of melodies, effects, and guitar solos in songs such as "King James," "Soothsayer," "Electronic Slight of Hand," and "The Fairy and the Devil."
Venturing into a heavier, darker, more aggressive sound, Buckethead in The Elephant Man's Alarm Clock displays amazing speed and technique with songs such as "Final Wars," "Baseball Furies," and "Lurker at the Threshold," a four-song compilation. And with The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, Buckethead completely descends into the depths of shred, thrash, and death metal insanity in an all-out display, resembling, if there were one, the soundtrack to hell.
The Bucketheadland Toystore
For more information on Buckethead visit the Bucketheadland website where a free track is located, "The Homing Beacon," dedicated to Michael Jackson. Buckethead's music is available for purchase at Travis Dickerson Music via Buckethead's Toystore.
Fans can also find music and documentary footage on the DVDs Secret Recipe and Young Buckethead Vol. I and II.
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