Released: August 17, 2011
Length: 30:43

The journey through the underground chamber begins with a mess of electronic noise over a steady hip hop drum beat. It doesn’t take long before it kicks off into a introductory guitar solo before moving on to more electronic mess. Things slow down at the 2:30 mark, like you’re waiting for an elevator to take you further down. It’s about here when some REAL MANLY GUITAR STUFF ramps up into full gear. It doesn’t take long before Buckethead does some nimble pick work over a slightly industrial backbone.

Stand-up comedian Eugene Mirman’s album I’m Sorry (You’re Welcome) is 540 tracks! Glug!

Underground Chamber is one single 31-minute track. It bounces around like crazy, never really sticking with one style too long before moving onto something else. I used to be intimidated by extra-long tracks. The longest track I had ever listened to until I became a Phish fan was Frank Zappa’s “Billy the Mountain”, which is about 24 minutes long. Stuff like Leng Tch’e by Naked City (also 31 minutes) and Delìrivm Còrdia by Fantômas (74 minutes!) were always skipped over when deciding upon other albums by the same bands. Just the idea of the same thing for such a long runtime felt daunting to me. I have a similar apprehension with albums that have dozens of tracks. Have you ever heard Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s Altered States of America? I haven’t! It’s 100 tracks! Granted, almost all of them are less than 30 seconds each, but come on, man! That’s too many tracks!

OK, I’m at the 13-minute mark of Underground Chamber already and it sounds like your typical Buckethead melodic riffing over some slight backmasking in the percussion. It sounds cool, like he’s playing with some knobs with his other two hands while he shreds. Like a quadrapus.

Since a single unbroken track doesn’t leave me much to riff off of (pun intended), let me take a moment to wax nostalgic about what got me into Buckethead in the first place! The year was 2007, back when I thought his output was pretty sizeable already! The dude couldn’t have put out more than 25 albums back then (many collaborations, though), but I absolutely adored Frank Zappa’s Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar, Guitar, and Trance-Fusion records and I was looking for another guy who made entire albums of guitar hero exercises. Sure, I could’ve settled for Steve Vai, or Joe Satriani, or Paul Gilbert, or Jeff Beck, but how much more enigmatic could you be besides Buckethead?

You’re not even wearing a mask, Joe! You’re fooling nobody with those sunglasses.

I’m at the 20-minute mark, and the riffs have become very straightforward while the rhythm section jumps between organic drumming and synthesized drum machine scrapes and shuffles. This has already changed to strange high-register picking, distorted into odd, bended notes before reverting back. Low-key stuff starts up at 21:30! This album is all over the place!

I was fascinated by Buckethead’s anonymity and prolificacy. I liked how his debut, Bucketheadland, was a complete roller coaster (pun intended) of genres and styles. I liked how Colma was as chill as it gets. I liked how Bermuda Triangle was just a complete jumble of electronic noise and bizarre, otherworldly guitar work. Enter the Chicken features vocals from Serj Tankian of System of a Down! That’s cool, right? Serj is a straight-up G.

29-minute mark. Buckethead is doing that thing where he makes his guitar sound like a bandsaw. Then he just noodles with sparse picking. There is barely any real percussion at this point, almost as if the end of the titular Underground Chamber is a big room where you get electrocuted and slaughtered and there is no God. Scary stuff, but you never leave the Underground Chamber alive!…

The end! Fun stuff, you guys. Thank you for making it to the end of the Underground Chamber alive with me. See you on the next trip.