Buckethead & Friends, Enter The Chicken

For the true fan of the half-man, half-chicken god of shred known as Buckethead, any new release is cause for celebration. Luckily, he’s been pretty prolific over the years, putting out an astounding body of work while staying as far away from the mainstream music community as you could possibly get. This guy doesn’t just fly under the radar, he’s actually buried about a mile below it, deep down in the earth. He has a rabid core of fans (mostly dudes that play metal guitar in their bedrooms) that think he’s the coolest thing since the distortion pedal was invented, but he also has his detractors, who are mostly shred guitar devotees that spend their days practicing sweep-picking exercises at really loud volumes at their local Guitar Center store. If you’re one the latter, stop reading and go listen to one of your crappy Steve Vai CDs.

For Enter The Chicken, Buckethead teamed up with System of a Down vocalist Serj Tankian and several other guest musicians to produce a record that is a buffet line of musical styles and guitar firepower. “We Are One” is the most accessible track on the disk and is as close to a standard rock song as you are gonna get with the chicken man at the controls. Tankian belts out the lyrics in his trademark nasally “quacking” style, while Buckethead backs him up with dense rhythmic chunks on the ol’ six-string.

But the shred doesn’t really drop until “Botnus,” and as always, it’s worth the wait. Much like his invented persona, the over-the-top silliness is what makes his solos so much fun. Guest vocalist Efrem Schulz brings the Cookie Monster death metal vocals like a champ, which make the track just flat-out rock. There are a few clunkers here, but for the most part when the focus stays on the heavier side of things, it ends up being pretty satisfying. And if you stick it out until the end, the last song, “Nottingham Lace,” delivers the traditional Buckethead experience that fans of his earlier work are going to flip for. It’s a six-and-a-half-minute instrumental that lets the chicken king do what he does best, and that is no-holds-barred freakout guitar playing.

Buckethead isn’t ever going to become a household name. His brief (and some would say misguided) stint with Guns N Roses was the closest he was ever going to come to that. But true fans of his work shouldn’t worry; he’ll probably continue to put out record after record of tasty, nutjob-style playing. I mean, what do you expect from a guy that wears a mask and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head when he performs?