Buckethead
Electric Tears

Little sunlight enters my room.

It is simply dark, bare, the walls white, perfectly white, I'd say anonymous. Perhaps worthless. But it gains light every morning when, lulled by the chirping of sparrows outside in my garden, I open the windows. Especially in this period, the air that enters is fresh and illuminated by a pale sun. As Gino Paoli sang, this room no longer has walls but trees. It unexpectedly takes on autumnal scents, sweet and gentle. And although there's still the unmade bed in my room, everything seems perfect when this ethereal morning and melancholic light reigns supreme.

If music could evoke such an atmosphere, would you listen to it? If a record, a song, a melody could express and paint on the bare walls of a room a similar feeling of fullness but at the same time complete emptiness, would you appreciate it?

It's naturally difficult to represent an emotion. I don't want to seem rhetorical, nor poetic, nor philosophical. I would risk being excessive in describing a shiver, a fear, a joy, or a tear. “Electric tears,” precisely. A marathon, a race, a walk, or a descent into the emotionality of the soul. A sort of rebirth, an awakening of sweet thoughts and comforting emotions.

The author of these sound pages is Buckethead, the quirky guitarist, author of visionary albums narrating alternate worlds dominated by aliens or machines. Here he narrates my deepest emotions. Perhaps ambient, but endowed with blues, acoustic shades, and at times jazz. I can define it without daring as “Colma 2.” It is its brother, it is surely its twin. Indeed, it is decidedly superior. No, no... we are not faced with a catalogable record. We are faced with a few notes, a few chords that draw, color with too many brushes a world ethereal and alien to reality.

As I said in the introduction, these little musical gems fill, envelop the space and make it bright but rich in shadows. Rich in joy and feeling, but like a medal, it has a much sadder, more intimate, certainly melancholic face. Buckethead plays with his guitar: he makes it sing, makes it cry, makes it shout, makes it rejoice and makes it suffer, makes it anguish but also makes it laugh. He surely lets it speak.

And if I had to fall asleep at sunset, I would surely listen to “All in the waiting,” sweetly plucked, a sweet acoustic sound to share with the natural space, and as a nighttime counterpart, in the moonlight, “Sketches of Spain (for Miles),” a kind of semi-medieval melody, a tribute to good old Miles Davis. Here enters silently an electric tear, the electric and subdued sound of his electric guitar, which soon after leaves space to the poignant “Padmasana.” The mind takes flight in this world made of immaterial yet musical reality. Only sound waves fill my home prison. “Mustang” is psychedelic. “The way to heaven” is the first sweet arrow to the heart, in its broken chords it makes me bleed without pain. And while I observe the blood flowing from the sweet wound, the listening leads me to the baptism of solitude: “Baptism of Solitude” alleviates the shadows by granting light. Its slightly distorted blues-flavored notes lead me further with thought. And if psychedelia returns with “Kansas Storm,” with very electronic sounds, “Datura” brings desolation and desertification into my environment. Sinister, claustrophobic, certainly dark, to be listened to under the nighttime starry skies.

“Mantaray” increases the strong emotional dose, intensifying the dose of suffered and poignant notes, as well as “Witches on the heat,” a tearful blues ballad enriched by the album's elements: subdued effects, sweet layers of delay and echoes, gentle, warm, and soft distortions. In the continuous darkness of listening, welcoming with open arms the suffering acoustic guitar of “Angel Monster,” waiting to get lost in the evocative “Electric Tears.” I feel lost in such darkness. Fortunately, the night is about to end, and I open the morning with “Spell of the Gypsies.” Certainly sunny, smiling, still endowed with that black nocturnal charm. But it liberates the dawn and brings forth the sun.

I am facing yet another successful album by Mr. Buckethead.

In the sea of melody, I manage to find myself, to enjoy a moment of silence. A journey through the night, a little trip into emotional darkness to rise again to the light, to return to morning joy.

To be listened to and loved, an album that will continue to move.