The 2006 album The Sea Swells A Bit from Nadja guitarist Adian Baker is one of my favorite AB solo discs. The disc came out on the Italian post-rock label A Silent Place and is packaged in a nice gatefold jacket that is constructed out of a thick, lacquered cardstock. The album features three epic tracks that run from 15-20 minutes each, and Aidan plays with extended guitar leads, drum machine and tape loops over the course of each of these sprawling instrumentals. The guitar playing is dense and dreamy, incandescent feedback floating over plodding programmed beats that lumber through his cloudy ambience, bluesy leads buried in the murky cosmic drones. I hear hints of the gauzy ambient post-rock of bands like Stars Of The Lid and Labradford as well as the percussive-driven drone rock of Aidan's ARC project in here, and these tracks are more propulsive and rhythmic than most of his other solo recordings.

The title track opens the disc with an ominous sounding guitar melody that slowly and gradually begins to build into a wash of murky dreampop, the main guitar glowing with gloomy reverb that hangs heavily over the melody, additional guitars coming in and strumming moody chord progressions, a washed out breakbeat becoming visible in the distance way off behind the guitars, the whole sound thick and moody and ominious.

Grooving percussion emerges on the second song "When Sailors Die" as the sound becomes more fully formed, the hushed whispers and soporific space drones of the first track now coming together into a hazy melodic blur and layered with more warbling feedback and endlessly looping fragments of melody, joined by a muffled, murky breakbeat throbbing away deep down in the miasma of tonal drift.

But the album's most rhythm powered track is the final song "Davey Jones Locker", which scatters fuzzy clouds of whirling synths and washes of blissy cosmic drone over an undercurrent of pulsating percussion. Slow and drugged out and dreamy, the sound of Loop looped into a fifteen minute slow motion dirge over a shuffling narcoleptic breakbeat.