I'll never forget where I was when I heard the news: indifferently naked, reeling from a late-night session at the pub which, incedentally, devolved into a sloppy, domestic beer-fueled celebration of Hanukkah, which in turn devolved into about two dozen slurred and degenerate rounds of gambling over the dreidel. My friends and I had turned a lovely Festival of Lights into an wanton exercise in self-abuse, and to make matters worse, we'd topped the evening off with a 4:00am excursion into the Chicago urban badlands for White Castle. It's what we craved. Between us, we ate sixty little burgers-- not including the four patties I jammed under the shotgun seat of my friend's car for laughs. The next morning I was sick in mind and body, but what's worse: I was sick in spirit.

This what not the right frame of reference to accept the news that the Saturday New York Times had to offer, stuck smack in the middle of the national news: "Chicago-Based Online Religious Cult Proclaims Rock Guitar Dead... Again." I skipped over the introductory filler about the status of Pitchfork's pending Supreme Court battle for tax-exempt status as a religious organization; I cut right to the creamy middle: "Michael Sandlin, apparently acting in accord with the wishes of Pitchfork overlord Ryan Schreiber, has reposted his 50 Worst Guitar Solos on the group's aggressively popular website." The accompanying photo (from 1996) showed a small group of foreign tourists rubbing Schreiber's belly as is customary on pilgrimage. In the background, you could clearly discern two nubile female converts fighting over the tatters of Schreiber's Jon Spencer Blues Explosion T-shirt, considered a relic and a powerful aphrodisiac by many followers.

"While Sandlin refused to speak to members of the press about his controversial list," the article went on, "Pitchfork spokespersons have told us that Sandlin claims that he received his word 'from beyond, by the will of Schreiber.' Apparently, Sandlin and his co-religionists at Pitchfork claim to have done this 'for the evolution of the species, for love of the world.'

"An inside source, a highly placed member of the Pitchfork group, has informed us that the list does not represent the views of the entire group; his opinions are considered heretical and he has therefore opted for anonymity. Our source said, 'What the fuck, man? Zappa! Willie the Pimp, that's just too much! Ragging on Metheny is okay, but what kind of person calls Mahavishnu John McLaughlin a bozo?! It's asinine, it's lunacy.' Apparently, he has not made his opinions known to the group or Schreiber out of fear for his life."

I looked up at my Zappa poster: "The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die," it said. My Mahavishnu Orchestra reviews! My strict New Jersey upbringing! They would know it was me. It wouldn't be long until they put two and two together. I guessed that I had time to pen one final review-- a last testament of sorts, before the knock at the door. I know how it happens: a colleague shows up, pretending to be my friend, maybe to deliver some new review discs, offering to buy me some buffalo wings and a few beers. Days later, they'll find me in Lake Michigan, or propped up with a book on my face in the University of Chicago Library stacks, or stuffed in the trunk of my car wearing a black Yes T-shirt from their Union tour. My neighbors will deny ever knowing me. There is precious little time.

Cobra Strike by the 13th Scroll is a Buckethead project, and even though one could successfully dust for Bill Laswell's fingerprints on the production technique, the guitar mysterioso is clearly calling the shots. The El Stew band, including Primus drummer Brain and Invisibl Skratch Piklz DJ Disk, is left mostly intact. It all amounts to a manifesto for freedom: the freedom to create a future for cock-rock guitar pyrotechnics. Big loopy shredwork for all the skate-rats and attention-deficit bangers.

Buckethead, masked as the Phantom of the Opera with a bucket of fried chicken on his head, marries the heroic with the ludicrous, alternating between truly disturbing cyborg-style fretwork and ballsack-based psychedelic blues riffage. Crunchy noise and fuzzy industrial musculature flex over delinquent hip-hop breaks. Sure, it's excessive and self-indulgent-- it's rock guitar! But, goddamnit, it's American. If you try to take away our right to abuse ourselves and others with masturbatory wankery, we might as well be Canadian.

And Cobra Strike isn't brainless guitar-terrorism a la Satriani and Vai, anyway. It flaunts its self-conscious sense of the absurd over every digitally-coded square millimeter of the disc. It's the awful soundtrack to the monster movie that America is rapidly becoming. No, in all seriousness: it's a solid alchemy of wank and weird, firecracker guitar and beats that are as ludicrously oversized as the novelty foam cowboy hats I used to get at the Great Adventure in the Mt. Vernon of my boyhood, New Jersey. Don't cry for me, I am already dead.

-Brent S. Sirota