Review Summary: "Hey guys look, we're making music. Cooooooooooooool."
Have you ever heard a band that just makes you picture dirty, smelly hippies playing? BUS accomplish that in spades on their album,
…Moving People, a mixture of mainstream rock, keys and cello, and lots of ska/reggae. Imagine State Radio taken to the next level in terms of ska-isms, combined with stoners, and throw in a female vocalist just to mix things up. Yeah, they make interesting music, but goddamn can they be immensely irritating while doing it.
BUS play a pretty non-linear brand of rock, with lots of hip hop influence when it comes to singing. There is a lot to compare here with third wave ska, and if they replaced the cello and accordion they occasionally use with traditional third wave horns, you’d be pretty hard pressed to not consider them such. However, they don’t fall into the trap of repeating themselves over and over in every song, leaving plenty of variations within most of the songs, trying to keep your attention throughout.
Songs like “Sometimes”, arguably the centerpiece of the album, have great grooves, good incorporation of the outside instruments, and catchy hooks and vocals. They feature the occasional scat singing, which is usually immensely horrifying and best saved for drunken encounters with struggling female musicians, but BUS make it work in context. Where “Sometimes” and most of the rest of the album fails is with terrible lyrics, and a tendency to repeat things to the point of annoyance.
“There are many moves in chess like life-some moves are right and some moves are wrong” is essentially the entire lyrical substance of the album; bad similes, metaphors and comparisons that have a motif of saying right, wrong, bad, and good over and over. They also repeat the same accordion parts throughout the album, leaving one of the cooler aspects of the music to become gimmicky by albums end. They generally keep up with different guitar pieces and the rhythm section keeps it tight, but when your using the same vocal arrangements and tricks in every song, the variations in music don’t make it out very well.
Its hard to knock the album though, as it has some solid tracks. “The Winds of Change” drops most of the reggae influence and is just a good rock song until it falls back into a rap pitfall near its end, its still a solid song. “High Expectations” is the best mixture of the genres BUS sets out to combine, and fluidly combines a strong female vocal performance with the best beat on the album. Normally, when BUS keeps the songs shorter, and less repetitive, they have more success. Good rule of thumb for them to follow.
The review is probably too harsh, as BUS is just a bunch of hippies making pretty good music. They aren’t trying to make something innovative, but they still happen to do something kind of unique and interesting. There are still lines like “Take the ferry across the river Styx/where its very, very hot like butt sex with hot chicks” that pretty much ruin any message BUS are trying to deliver, but at least aesthetically they are pleasing for short bursts, and definitely have a sound to build on in the future.
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