Album of the Day

Monsters and Robots, by Buckethead (1999): Buckethead was one of those names I'd heard for a long time without actually checking him out. I knew he was a guitar player and I knew he at least bumped up against the prog world here and there. I did not realize that he actually wore a KFC bucket on his head while on stage. 'course, you can't see that on CD, so it's good to know that the music rises beyond the gimmick. He alternates between serious Vai-esque shredding, but also has a knack for more esoteric sounding stuff in the Fripp/Belew mold. On this disc, that all bounds around songs cobbled together with help from Les Claypool and Brain of Primus and Bootsy Collins, among others. It even tells his origin story, after a fashion:



Gotta' get me some more of this.