Listening to Buckethead is akin to sitting captive in some loser’s basement, really wanting to leave, since he’s just meaninglessly shredding on his bottom-of-the-line Ibanez with the backdrop of a cheap MIDI drumbeat, but not knowing how to walk out without looking like a huge jerk. Despite being a technical whiz at breezing through obscure prog-rock scales at breakneck speed, Buckethead’s album couldn’t be more dreadfully boring. His last solo studio record, “Cyborg Slunks,” is a five-track, forty-four-minute journey into avant-garde mind-numbing nothingness. Of course, Buckethead is most known for replacing Slash and Robin Finck during Guns N’ Roses’ awful “Chinese Democracy is just around the corner!” phase, and for wearing a KFC bucket on his head to protest cruelty to chickens—because nothing says “rights for our oppressed avian friends” quite as eloquently as wearing the famous bucket during a series of self-indulgent, twelve-minute, compressed wah-wah solos. (Andy Seifert)
Brutal Finesse: A Preview of King Crimson at Ravinia There have been few new compositions from King Crimson these past two decades, but the live arrangements of songs from its catalog are often strikingly different than the recorded versions.
