When listening to Tera Melos' excellent new Patagonian Rats, the first thing that strikes you is that guitarist Nick Reinhart is singing. It's not an unfamiliar sound, especially if you loved the last Bygones album (on my top five of '09, to be sure), but prior to this (and the one-off covers EP, Idioms) this power trio was pretty resoundingly sans vocals.
For the busy math-rockers that they are, this could have been a disaster; case in point, Hella's There's No 666 in Outer Space-- while not an awful album, it does beg the question: did they really need a singer? Considering the density of the songs themselves-- the stop/start dynamics, the unstable tonalities-- it does tend to complicate things.
But then again, Tera Melos has never been a band to shy away from complication. Their particular brand of math-rock has always been a little knottier than others, mixing stomp-box noise breakdowns, breezy jazz interludes and death metal speed runs, sometimes all within the confines of a single three-minute song. But like Hella before them, is there room for a singer in such a hyperactive environment?
The answer is a resounding "hell yes." Well, as long as you're as savvy and fearless as Reinhart, and have an ear for vocal hooks. Patagonian Rats is brimming with them, but fear not, virtuoso-shred-nerds, because there's still plenty of room for their special brand of instrumental pyrotechnics-- like Bygones, Reinhart has figured out a way to seamlessly meld the two. The big difference here is where Bygones keeps things punkishly trim (generally 3-4 minutes), Tera Melos is more ambitious, with a few pieces over the 8-minute mark. What saves them from bogging down in their midsections is the arrangements, throwing a few "WTF?!" moments in there to keep things interesting. In fact, it's just such moments-- like the authentically 80s Foreigner sax solo in "Trident Tail," or the crawling grind of "Party With Gina" – that make this album truly remarkable.
The album cover features the word "Happy" propped on a hillside, Hollywood-style, under a viscid, ominous-looking sky, and this is a great visual analogy to what goes on musically-- three musicians at the peak of their abilities, but never willing to play things safe. In a recent interview, the band said this was the album they've always wanted to make, and it's easy to see why.
[Tera Melos Myspace]
[Buy Patagonian Rats from Sargent House]
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