Buckethead
Electric Sea

Buckethead, for those who are not familiar with him (which means almost everyone :) ), is a peculiar shredder guitarist who ranges from acoustic music to the most energetic funk metal, from the darkest dark ambient to the most bizarre and redundant progressive, and he also appears in public masked with... um... an upside-down bucket on his head.

His discography is enormous: after 30 studio albums in the '90s, 2000s, and early 2010s, in 2011 he began a series of albums released more or less weekly, the Buckethead Pikes. He has already surpassed 200 Pikes!

However, "Electric Sea" is his thirty-fifth album, the latest in order of time not to be part of the Pikes, but released after the fourth Pike.

It starts with the almost entirely acoustic "Electric Sea" and "Beyond the Knowing", tracks where the acoustic guitars have time to change their sound, traversing different moods. "Swomee Swan," on the other hand, is mostly composed of minimal and tear-jerking electric guitar chords. "Point Doom" is a song with a very fast, fun, Spanish-like classical guitar, only accompanied by the electric one at the end. The atmosphere becomes tense with "El Indio," which ends with a classic hard rock electric guitar solo. At this point, the album is characterized by three classical music covers: "La Wally" by Alfredo Catalani, "La Gavotte" and "Backethead" by J. S. Bach. The brief and minimal "Yokohama" and "Gateless Gate" serve as an introduction to the concluding, emotional tribute to Michael Jackson: "The Homing Beacon."

In conclusion, this album is not Buckethead's peak in technique, which nonetheless shows that with an acoustic and few contributions from the electric, a lot can be achieved. It is not even the emotional peak, which perhaps we find in "Colma," but it is not far from being it.