Bus Gas’ third full length album “Snake Hymns” is a continuation of their goal of seamlessly melding writhing improvisations with fully composed passages. The resulting songs, spliced together from a mess of magnetic tape, guitar strings and analog synth rumbles, are their darkest and most ethereal to date. Gone are some of their more grounded, earthy moments, replaced by something all together more ghostly and weightless.
Originally released in a limited edition of 100 cassettes by Spring Break Tapes
www.springbreaktapes.com /
springbreaktapes.bandcamp.com/music
Reviews
"Top 200 Tapes of 2014"
— Tabs Out Podcast
"...nobody gets close to the epic dreamscapes of the Bus Gas crew. Their gradually-widening, nuanced textural workouts have often
felt like improvised songforms, a droned-out distillation of postrock guitar timbres, but deliberately improvising toward those kind of weighty triumphant meridians one finds at the climax of Godspeed or Explosions tunes."
— Words on Sounds
"Man, this stuff feels absolutely alive. The timbres, and the combination of textures is just off the charts. Snatches of desert rock, glitched electronics, who knows? It's a hypnotic wall of smoke a mile wide. It's a rainstorm rolling across the horizon. Devastatingly beautiful stuff."
— Guide Me Little Tape
"Enter Snake Hymns, the latest outing by Bus Gas, the Omaha-based post-rock act whose doomed, dreadful terrain is making more of this empty space in our collective soul than any one else before. But this isn’t an obsessive follower, the sonics here are wholly sincere and genuinely looming, more than a project haunted by forbears."
— Decoder
"Snake Hymns is a far out trip on magnetic tape accompanied by delayed guitars and booming aquatic synth work. It’s a testament to the trio’s skill that a recording such as this can be as haunting as it it alluring. Like fireflies in the evening, the gloom presented here is punctuated by just enough light that you’ll willingly follow it into the bush."
— OMGVinyl
"...there are beautiful similarities to Jonny Greenwood film-scoring and odd feelings of tragedy when comforting riffs are slowly steamrolled by noise."
— Hear Nebraska
"These are desolate soundscapes full of surging delayed guitars, forlorn and windswept washes of drone that drift like worried fire through an empty prairie and a sense of unease that sits on these tracks like a pregnant carrier jet."
— Tome to the Weather Machine
"These songs sound dusty and ravaged, as if some grand catastrophe has befallen the world and they are the last ones alive to explain what happened. Through their music, Bus Gas is painting a visceral and uncertain landscape that must be seen and heard to be able to be fully understood—a simple description would not do it justice."
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Nooga.com