Review Summary: There may be attention to detail inside, but it's still diluted musically on the outside
Hey Bucket,
I won’t lie, I haven’t been listening to your stuff for a while now. Your output rate just keeps on snowballing out of control. Last time I wrote you one of those things, you were on Pike 24 and I was slapping you over the head for putting out 8 hours of half-baked material up to that point during that year. Now you’re on Pike 99. That’s a bit over a day and a half of music that you’ve put out over the past 15 months.
Why am I writing you now then? I was lounging around after the Christmas festivities finished, just recharging my batteries after family celebrations. For whatever reason I decided to drop by your side of the internet, and you decided to hand this thing out. Hey, free album, why not. My main concern with your music last time around was the lazy, half-assed nature of the tracks, where it felt like you were exerting the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary to throw together a record and get it shipped out. Have you fixed that? Well, a bit. You managed to fix the presentation and care about the details, but the main issue of musical content dilution still stands.
You managed to perfect your craft since last time around quite a bit, now you pay far more attention to arrangement quirks and whatnot. I guess it helps to have almost 100 of these things under your belt in terms of experience of quick album making. Take a listen to the opener, and the near 10-minute run time is mostly made up of one vamp. However, the rhythm guitar is actually doing stuff in the background – the picking and chord shapes shift just a tiny little bit, giving off the vibe of an actual live jam. You go for a spastic fuzzy lead in the title track, eventually landing in a pool of lasers, but you make sure that the backing throbs and sways just a little as you fry your pickups. I enjoy this, it gives the album a more organic and less mass-manufactured feel. I have no idea how common this is in your work these days, as my contact with the past 50 records of yours has been non-existent, but well done on this one.
Unfortunately, in spite of the improved attention to detail, it’s not all fun and games. Your bass may be hitting some interesting grace notes or landing on the root for longer every now and then, but in the end it’s still saying the same thing. Three of your songs on here are close to the 10 minute mark, but they essentially present a single idea and flip it inside out a dozen times without properly diverging from it, taking the song to some other places and making it feel like it has discernible parts and structure. The opener takes a quick detour to a sprawling, cavernous major seventh chord of pure sorrow, but soon enough it’s locked back in the same exact vamp it started from. The three other tracks quickly deliver their slice of dirty, funky groove and proceed to milk it rather effectively. As the arrangement detail is relatively masterful, it takes a while to notice you’re actually going in circles and doing the same exact stuff most of the time. The tracks do get their moments equivalent to the wash of sorrowful major seventh chord, i.e. the music actually does veer off at a tangent for a while, but it’s never properly fleshed out and soon enough the song snaps back to the original idea. In order to make it less visible, the bass shifts around a bit and the guitar does octaves and more dead notes. You get the idea of what I’m saying.
I figured I’d also bring up the odd stylistic inconsistency of the record – the opener is mellow and brooding, along with the trademark soloing licks and tone that we’ve been subjected to since “Sail on Soothsayer”, and the other three tracks are something completely different. It sort of feels like you tacked the opener on from a completely different record, just gluing together what you had around into a song set long enough to become a Pike. Also, as it’s nitpick city, I adore the way you accidentally smack an open string towards the end of the third song, and this distracts you so much that you proceed to klutz up the riff reprise. It’s oddly endearing that you decided to keep that take.
So is this as viciously bad as the last stuff I bothered to review? Nah, it’s a bit better. It seems you’ve mastered the art of chaining these things one after another, and this actually sounds like a proper album. Unfortunately, it’s still not quite getting enough musical content per unit of album volume, and you end up rolling out 10 minutes or so of song from one basic idea that you occasionally slightly veer from, but mainly just flip around a bit. It’s quite commendable that you managed to pull off making a record out of four basic musical ideas that you rearranged into oblivion, but I remember times when you’d have four musical ideas better than everything on here within one track shorter than the shortest thing on here. Maybe once you hit 100 you should slow back down and make some of those again?
Merry Crimbo,
Turnip90210
