Cyborg Slunks

No one really knows what slunks are, but Buckethead sure has a lot of them in his discography. It’s not really a mystery how Cyborg Slunks ended up as a largely electronic album, though as usual me saying, “Brian made an electronic album” doesn’t really sum up the unique thing that we get. Here we have a release where Bucky wails on electric and acoustic guitars, plus we hear things like handclaps, face slaps, and a triangle. Yep, welcome to Bucketheadland. Again.

That trio of weird things all turn out to be beats in the electronic ensemble, part of which seems made up of things that Big B could lay hands on and sample. I’m pretty sure I also heard a recording of Tupperware falling over during ‘Reopening of the Scapula Factory’, which along with ‘Sneak Attack’ provides the location of a lot of the crazy I’ve just described. ‘Sneak Attack’ also reminds me that Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) is famed for being able to use his guitar as a turntable; well, frankly, Morello ain’t shit when Bucky comes to town. I suppose our favourite bucketed emcee has as many guitar pedals as Pikes, because ‘Sneak Attack’ represents my personal memory of the most disparate guitar sounds in one song.

It’s not all DJ stuff either, getting into sparser experiments during ‘New War Is Underway’, which seems to take an almost interminable time to come to its termination. We probably didn’t need 12 minutes of randomness to prove what the Buckster can do with mildly irritating atmosphere though. The other pieces generally run too long as well, only ‘Infiltration’ passing a relatively brief 4 minutes with fairly savoury funky bass and classic soloing, wailing away like a blues god (just Gary Moore, I guess) while electronic ticks and blips provide backing. The main exception to everything I’ve just said is ‘Aunt Suzie’, which appears at first to be another monster workout of weird percussion and guitar oddities, but is actually a very calm and focused piece of laidback jamming with some overdriven solo parts inserted at times. I had totally forgotten this track was on Cyborg Slunks (it seems an obvious fit for Colma or something else very chilled), such is the stylistic jump between it and the other compositions.

Therefore, exclude ‘Aunt Suzie’ from these closing comments. Experimentally, Cyborg Slunks can surely be counted as a success, attempting a great deal both with guitars and with impromptu percussion; however, the release doesn’t really make itself very listenable. In fact, parts of the pieces are quite annoying and jarring, but I have a feeling that Bucky knew that when he recorded them.