With names like Serj Tankian (System Of A Down), Saul Williams, Maura Davis (Denali), GiGi Laswell (aka Ejigayehu Shibabaw), Shana Halligan (Bitter:Sweet ), Dirk Rogers and Keith Aazami (from Los Angeles grincore freakos Bad Acid Trip), Maximum Bob (Deli Creeps) and opera singer Ani Maldjian, this promised to be at the very least an interesting new disc from that legendary shredder Buckethead, the towering Bill Laswell/John Zorn protege who wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket and an expressionless white mask. Buckethead released a bunch of pretty amazing solo albums and played in the seminal experimental funk/jazz/metal outfits Deli Creeps and Praxis in the 1990's, and left an indelible mark on the face of avant-garde guitar shred. In recent years, he went on to become a minor guitar celebrity in the mainstream by writing and performing music for a ton of movies and playing for a brief moment in the bizarre revamped Guns N' Roses lineup that surfaced a few years ago, but it's the newer solo albums like Enter The Chicken that we're investigating.

This album was first released in 2005 but was just re-released with a new track ("shen Chi"), and it's a collection of original songs that pair Buckethead with the aforementioned array of vocalists that leans further into pop territory than the guitarist's legendary 90's solo and band recordings. It's still an interesting mishmash of Buckethead's signature virtuoso shred and unorthodox guitar playing with more conventional sounds, and the album spans hip-hop (on the Saul Williams fronted "Three Fingers"), dreamy trip-hop ("Waiting Hare"), goofy death metal ("Funbus"), and spasmodic nu-metal ("We Are One"). His style of changing in the blink of an eye between metal riffing, weird rhythmic scratching, and insane lightspeed soloing is all over these tracks, and where I'd normally wouldn't be too interested in the nu-metal and trip-pop jams that are featured here, the crazy guitar stuff makes this pretty neat stuff.

One of the standout tracks is "The Hand", which glances back to the outre avant-funk/metal of Praxis with it's choppy thrash metal riffing, crazed funk riffs, shrill operatic female vocals, and fucked up rhyming from Deli Creeps vocalist Maximum Bob, all wrapped up in a thick blanket of guitar noise that emulates vinyl scratching (one of Buckethead's signature tricks) and electronic weirdness. The instrumental "Nottingham Lace" is another amazing composition that blends funk, metal, and insane, inhuman fretboard gymnastics into one of the catchiest songs on the album. And the bonus track "Shen Chi" melds together fluid robo-soloing with fractured breakcore, thrash metal beats, carnivalesque fretboard runs, and crushing metallic math riffs.

Now I'm just waiting to get my hands on the new Praxis album Profanation (Preparation for a Coming Darkness) ...when in the hell is this coming out in the U.S. ?