Artist: Tides From Nebula
Album: From Voodoo to Zen
Genre: Post-Rock
Country: Poland
Release date: 20th of September, 2019
Released via Long Branch Records
Cover Artwork © Long Branch Records, 2019
With their #5 album From Voodoo to Zen, Tides From Nebula dropped a complete firework of spherical drums, riffs and electronical sounds into our ears. And that’s something that does not happens that often – in my opinion. There are a lot of instrumental Rock/Metal bands out there that know how to play and pleasure the auditory canals of their listeners, but sometimes there are no actual new ideas or sounds surprising someone – especially if this happens within a genre that has the major share of your attention – but damn, this album surprised me a lot, and I mean it in a totally positive way.
The album starts kind of softly with “Ghost Horses”, but the electronical squabbling leads you perfectly on your trip for the next seven songs. Step by step, every other instrument enters the room, until the space odyssey begins. The instruments are clear and playful and the next song “The New Delta” showcases this perfectly: the electronic parts of the song feel decent and show us the path of the song – the instruments follow this part and embellish it. The song changes its rhythm a few times from calm parts to faster parts without any hard breaks – a quality that you can find throughout the entire album. After the more spectacular “Dopamine” and “Radionoize” which give you a certain Stranger Things vibe, a musical conclusion begins that lasts for two songs. The same-titled track “From Voodoo to Zen” lets you float with some faster parts, the end of the song touched me, it feels as if it liberates locked feelings within you. The sixth song “Nothing to Fear and Nothing to Doubt” sounds like its title, it doesn’t have a smooth transition from the last song, it’s something new for the listener – a new beginning, slowly, relaxing. This song talks to you, and only with the strength of the instruments, it gives you some hope for the future. It connects every single song before and gives you a lot of chills. However, and that’s what is a mystery for me, it’s the last song. It feels as if it doesn’t belong onto this album, it can’t reach the quality of the songs before, it feels more like a “we need one song more on the album” but then I don’t understand why it is positioned as final track. “Nothing to Fear and Nothing to Doubt” is a perfect ending song for this audio-visual trip.
There are some albums that can give you a feeling of a theme where you start to think that you might be able to eventually imagine what it was like to experience this. Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas‘ album Mariner feels like a trip in an old soviet submarine deep in the ocean, Heilung’s last album Furtha feels a lot as if you experienced the behaviour of a cult deep in the cold and dark woods. This album feels like a dive in a nebular of a galaxy and you can feel the force of the objects in space which are pulling on your body. Fans of instrumental Post-Rock should give this album and band a shot, I think that’s the stuff you want and one of my highlights this year. I rarely heard an album that talked so much to you only with the strength of their music and instruments.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
9/10
As usual, we added the favorite track(s) to our Transcended Review Playlist.
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