AURA

Tides from Nebula is a Polish instrumental post rock band, using their guitars to paint music in broad strokes. While this crew is far from talentless, the compositions themselves are downright amateurish, from recycled vi-V-IV chord progressions to lengthy blitzes of distorted guitar. Everything about this album, frankly, is riddled with cliché. Were Scott Stapp along for the ride, this could really be popular rock band only slightly more complex than Creed.

"Shall We?" Lengthy feedback-like notes set the tone for this piece, as more conventional semi-clean electric guitar, easy drums, and generic bass enter. This is very much a traditional hard rock track with a steady build, by which I mean that this piece sounds very similar to the likes of Creed or Fuel, but takes quite some time in developing the arrangement through layers of guitars.

"Sleepmonster" Dull and heavy, there's some light parts, but mostly the second, five-minute piece is a nondescript wall of rhythm guitar-based rock.

"Higgs Boson" This track begins on the lighter side, with bright guitar, but then quickly flees back to the heavy wash of distortion. Fortunately, the band doesn't stay there long, and intelligently brings back the gentler segment, which, if I didn't know better, I would have confidently said I was listening to modern-day Porcupine Tree. To my surprise, the band takes things in an even more minimalistic fashion, before bringing on the crashing guitars once more.

"Svalbard" Ultimately a throwaway track, this is just a noise-ridden interlude of some manner.

"Tragedy Of Joseph Merrick" The bass is outstanding on this very interesting track, which involves a carefully woven tapestry of multiple (and slightly out of tune) clean guitars of mildly varying effects. Instead of merely creating a barrage of noisy distortion, the band shows more technical prowess in firing off a volley of static runs.

"Purr" After a somewhat high-pitched and noisy introduction, the band plays a very pleasing yet completely formulaic chord progression, during which they sound just like Lifehouse (I could even hear Jason Wade singing in my head). There's a bombardment of distortion later, although the chord progression changes up just a bit. Toward the end, there's a high-pitched, screeching noise that is just unimaginably irritating.

"It Takes More Than One Kind Of Telescope To See The Light" The opening to this track follows the same formulaic chord progression from the previous track. The beginning sounds like "Pardon Me" by Incubus (just add turntables!), and then there's the obligatory onslaught of guitars.

"When There Were No Connections" There are some exceptional but short riffs, but at this point, it's all more of the same- heavy drudgery, nothing remarkable. The "lead" guitar consists of one note per every four measures (or just one note for sixteen bars the second time around), which doesn't make for very interesting listening.

"Apricot" Even if the band is trapped in the same chord progression, they inject some desperately needed variety in terms of textures and sound, particularly thanks to the bassist. At five and a quarter minutes, the music completely stops for the added cliché of moments of silence before a "hidden" track, which consists of one minute of a distorted electric piano riff. That, I call pointless.