Review Summary: Cyborg Slunks is like an over-the-top crazy roller-coaster. It has its fun parts, but it has a few bolts loose and at the end you're left with a sick feeling in your stomach
Buckethead releases loads of albums, up to 4-5 per year. 2008 saw some of his best (and worst) output. While he released an awesome if disjointed collaboration with That1Guy and an album of boring hard rock/metal songs (Albino Slug), he released two of my favorite albums by him in that year. One of them was the jazzy Dragons Of Eden and the other was Cyborg Slunks, a wildly varied collection of guitar noodling-based tracks. Cyborg Slunks wasn't very well received but it had some of Bucket's best playing in a long time. It produced at least one classic Buckethead song and saw Bucket returning to a form where he disregards the riffs and focuses on the shredding. This album was originally released as a limited edition and then made widely available to the public. It's one of his most fun releases, even if it isn't perfect.
Cyborg Slunks starts off pretty well. He plays various guitar licks throughout and shreds the entire album. He finds just the right balance of melody and noodling on a few tracks while on others all he does is just play random notes on the guitar. Throughout you have a wildly experimental album ranging from acoustic shred to some noodling you'd hear on early Buckethead albums to some awesome bluesy guitar playing. Aunt Suzie is definitely the best track on here. It's an 11 minute tribute to a dead aunt where he solos beautifully clean guitar playing over a haunting ballad-esque rhythm melody. It sounds like something you might hear off of his album Colma. Elsewhere he noodles on the kill switch and does some funky guitar playing. The thing is with this album it has 3 really good songs and 2 really bad ones. It's wildly unbalanced and never keeps a central theme throughout.
The two underwhelming tracks are track number's 2 and 5. 2 has some average acoustic guitar noodling laced over this terrible bouncy, electronic drum programming and random noises of machines and cows. The last 5th track is Buckethead doing some Tom Morello-esque kill-switch jamming and not having any sort of great melody on it. The problem with the album is that it has only 5 tracks. This should have been expanded to more tracks to keep it going at a healthy pace. I'd get pretty sick of listening to 10 minutes of the same notes and licks being played over and over again. Where it does it succeed, it succeeds pretty well. It's more killer than filler, and it produced at least one
Buckethead classic. Overall, a fun album worth listening to if you're interested in Buckethead or want to hear some of his more experimental material
3/5
