Review: Bumblefoot – Bumblefoot…Returns!
Hey sorry I was out for a bit there, guys. I was in the bathroom.
Bumblefoot’s return to solo material actually marks the first time I had heard of the guy. In my defense, when his debut solo album released I think I was more concerned with finger painting and looking forward to naptime and a snack, and in the years after that I didn’t much care for Guns N’ Roses, where he had a steady gig playing guitar with the group.
That being said, I think it ended up being really cool to go into this promo without having much familiarity with the musician himself, because it’s an incredibly strong and varied offering and does one of my favorite things of all time where it refuses to stick to a single easily-defined genre. You could stick it under the prog-rock/metal umbrella, but that category is so wide and varied that on its own it doesn’t mean much.
The first two tracks give what one might expect to hear when delving into a progressive instrumental rock and metal record, with tons of polish and a lot of twisty earworm licks and riffs. There’s a lot of funky use of textures and synth sounds that I like quite a bit and if you like Devin Townsend at all these tracks will almost definitely be right up your alley.
Then “Moonshine Hootenanny” kicks in, and this is where I was really hooked. It’s still proggy and heavy, but the hootenanny building blocks made this track a ton of fun. Unfortunately, at least on my end my enthusiasm went down a bit with the next track, a prog rock rendition of Chopin’s Waltz (Op. 62 no. 2). This might just be a Ben thing, but much in the way I tend to really not like Muzak/classical easy listening arrangements of popular music, popular music renditions of classical pieces tend to fall a bit flat for me. In both cases there are critical subtleties that get lost in translation. This rendition is decent on a technical level, but it just doesn’t really do it for me overall.
Enough bellyaching, though. Aside from the talented Mr. Bumblefoot himself, this album has a few guest appearances from Steve Vai, Brian May, Guthrie Govan, and Ben Karas. Each track with a guest musician is a different vibe and really does let the guest’s brand of musicianship shine through. My faves out of the guest features are “Monstruoso,” featuring Steve Vai, and “Funeral March” featuring Ben Karas, though all of them are very worth listening to.
My top three tracks overall would be “Simon in Space,” “Planetary Lockdown,” and “Monstruoso,” but the entire album is more than worth listening to and has a ton of funk and variety to it, and everything has a lot of musicality to it.
4/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
…Returns! is out on January 26. If you dig it you can buy it digitally on Bandcamp or physically through bumblefoot.com
