Released: July 14, 2011
Length: 32:00

“Comb and Wattles” gets weird with it right away, and not just because of the perplexing name. Fuzzing guitar that sounds like an engine revving, then some funky funk-ass bass, then some technical shredding, then some pulsing beats, then some nimble bass plucking, then some straight riffage, then I’m tired of typing about this track already! I don’t know what the “Wattles” part of the track title comes from, but I lived in a neighborhood growing up where one of the major adjacent roads was Wattles Rd. Maybe Buckethead visited my shitty hometown once?

You sicken me, creep.

Oh no, he didn’t. Why would he? I looked that word up, and it’s the red thing that hangs down from a rooster’s neck. That gross thing. Those things are crazy. If I had one I’d get it caught in my zipper all the time. I’m always wearing things with zippers.

So far, Pike #2 aims to keep it diverse and energetic. The drumming around the riffs keeps switching up too, like it’s trying to keep up with whatever the fuck Buckethead decides to do every 15 seconds.

Ahh! The title track! Squishy, zappy electronic breakdowns with squealy and squeaky, very fast guitar tones. I don’t know exactly what’s going on with that cover art, but neither that image nor the track’s complete domination of filled-to-the-brim experimental riffage bring to mind anything I would even remotely call “empty space”. The cover art reminds me of two things: Jabu Jabu’s Belly from Zelda: Ocarina of Time, likely due to the stringy red shapes, and, for some reason MC Escher’s “Relativity” (that painting with all the crazy staircases going every which way). I don’t know why it reminds me of Escher, since the only stairway seen in the art isn’t too crazy. But it COULD be crazy, I guess. I don’t know, I’m just typing over here.

“Dummy Egg” has a deceptively mellow beginning, but then it goes nuts just like everything else in Empty Space. There are so many different musical ideas going on that it’s impossible to believe that Buckethead would make hundreds of these, and counting, for the next 11 years. Of course, maybe they really start sucking after #190. I’ve only been to #45, which isn’t even 15% of the total output! This motherfucker be nuts.

Sorry, Les. There’s no room for you here.

“Pullets” brings back the funk. The funky stuff is always fun. Interesting that Les Claypool collaborated with Buckethead on a couple of projects, because much of the bass is very reminiscent of Primus. I’m pretty sure, though, that the entire Buckheatland Pike project is a solo effort. It’s like he holed himself up in his parents’ basement and beat those drums and flicked that bass and molested his guitar every day into the wee hours of the night! Except I think his parents might be dead now, and that made him very sad.

Heh heh! Sorry! More levity is coming right up. Just kidding. The phrase “empty space” reminds of one of the most terrifying concepts I’ve ever read about as a kid. Stephen King wrote a story about a futuristic method of teleportation travel called “jaunting”. Jaunting requires the travelers to be unconscious; it is known that conscious travel will result in the traveler being fully aware and awake for the duration of the trip. And the implication is that it will feel like billions of years in an empty void to the conscious traveler. So a kid holds his breath during the anesthesia process and experiences the near-eternity of conscious void livin’.

And that’s not even the worst part for me. The worst part was a story of a man who pushed his conscious wife into the machine and broke the teleporters so that she would be trapped conscious for a literal eternity. THAT is the one that fucked me up. There’s not enough rounds of 99 Bottles of Beer to get me through something like that.

Oh hey, the album’s over. See you next time!