TERA MELOS

Most of the time, Math rock is too non stop, and emotionless for me, bands like Don cabellero are what I call too grindcore, but Tera Melos is something different. If theres one thing I love about Math rock, it's three or four guys with the skill of all the members of Dream Theater, but not being a bunch pretensious a**holes showing off. Math rock bands are more concentrated on creating an intense, fast paced, and extremely technical rythym, but as I said, it usually comes with the price of being just too much, especially for a hardcore post rock fan such as myself. Tera Melos though, knows how to control this grindcore effect, and utilzes both the speed, and technicality of Math rock, and the restraint, and snsibility of post rock. Leaving albums like this, leveled out, evenly distributed, and semi easy listening.

All the songs are basically gems, with the centerpiece of all of them being the amazing guitar riffing and technicality. If you watch some of their videos, you see the lead guitar player tapping away to form the melody, and you're just in shock as to how such technical stuff can make such beautiful music. Polyrythmic drumming is also a math rock essential, and this band does it great. The drummer is so furios the whole time, you may question how he dosent pop a blood vein, playing as fast and technical as he does. The only song I have a beef with is the twenty minuete long melody eight, I mean it's good, but it does drag on, and of course gets a little stale, and I just dont think it fits with all the other shorter songs, but really the song isnt that bad.

If you're a fan of seventies symph prog, I cant recomend this to you. If you're a fan of extremely chill post rock such as sigur ros, or GY!BE, I cant recomend this to you. If you're a fan of the faster side of post rock, or math rock, I highly recomend this amazing album to you. Even the tech metal fans might have a good time with this album. 4 stars.

'Tera Melos' - Tera Melos (7/10)

I have known about Tera Melos for a while, but they were only recently brought back to my attention by another fan of experimental, free-thinking music. In fact, those two terms are ones I would first use to describe the music of this Sacramento-based band. Although Tera Melos are a post-rock band, or math rock, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it, there is a much more adventurous spirit in their music than the typical act of the genre that I'm used to hear. While Tera Melos would go to even further lengths of experimentalism in their music with further albums like 'Drugs To The Dear Youth', the self-titled debut meets an agreeable mix of pleasant sounds and unconventional writing.

Like many post/math rock acts, Tera Melos is almost entirely instrumental, and I can only imagine how someone would manage to fit vocals into this music. 'Tera Melos' is a very technical album, and while there are plenty of mellow guitar tones to enjoy on the album, the songwriting is like a tornado, picking up virtually everything it can get within its grasp, and run with it. Each of these tracks are called 'Melodies', an ironic name for the fact alone that most of these tracks have very little in the way of hooks or memorable melodies. Instead, each of these are chapters in a discordant, turbulent journey. Although Tera Melos never reaches the heaviness of metal, much of this music gets distorted and chaotic. To be honest, there are times on the album where things get a little too crazy and haphazard, and by the end of the album, it becomes that much less of a shock to hear the musicians constantly burst from mellow post-rock to pseudo-grindcore. Both the heavy and lighter elements of the band are highly impressive, although the band's forte is with their technical sensibilities.

'Tera Melos' is about as challenging as post-rock will get, and softer-leaning fans of the genre will probably turn their noses in disgust when they hear how bloody manic this thing gets. As someone who has long been looking for something fresh in my post-rock intake, 'Tera Melos' does the trick. Viciously technical, discordant, and just a little bit beautiful.

TERA MELOS has been one of the more innovative math rock bands of the 21st century displaying some of the most extreme attributes of the genre which incorporates highly complex time signature that are rich in instrumental interplay and had added various ambient electronic effects, unconventional and even bizarrely experimental song structures as well as exaggerated rhythmic patterns, start-stop dynamics, free improvisation and an extensive use of pedals and samplers.

The band formed as a result of the breakup of No Regard in the Sacramento, CA neighboring city of Roseville. After its demise, members Nick Reinhart (guitar, vocals, programming) and Nathan Latona (bass) started TERA MELOS in 2004 and soon recruited guitarist Jeff Worms and drummer Vince Rogers. While the band has existed as a trio in recent years, this debut album displays the more complex sound they wove together as a quartet before Worms jumped ship in 2006.

The band spent an entire year practicing before playing its first live gig and recorded this eponymously titled debut album during that time which consists of eight tracks simply and ironically titled "Melody," since the nerdy math rock presented here is about as non-melodic as you could ever desire. Despite the focus on the strangely displayed irregular drumbeats and the dangerous hyperactive syncopated guitars, the band excels in creating a varied stylistic approach that creates a knotty tapestry of strange sounds resulting in a rather pleasant sum of the parts.

TERA MELOS does a great job in showing how math rock is both related to hardcore punk as well as the ebbs and flows of post-rock. While the former is more reminiscent of the choppy antics of the Minutemen rather than the jaunty distortion of Discharge, the band succeeds in cranking out some seriously metallic cacophony from time to time through the jittery flow of the first seven tracks, however the post-apocalyptic soundtrack to hell resides at the end of the album with a 29 minute noise jam that is the musical equivalent of lava erupting from an angry volcano ready to lay waste to the world around. Comparisons to noise bands like Borbetomagus and Supersilent have been made.

The best word to describe TERA MELOS' debut offering is surreal. This album wends and winds all over the place but yet has a logical thread of continuity to it as well at least up til the final pyroclastic flow of sonic dystopia. The guitars are generally characterized by a clean vibrant sound that finds pleasant tones twisted and contorted into strange irregular shapes that somehow find themselves knotted up into tufts of sonic constipation but the band never stays put for too long and finds as many ways of releasing the tension as it does building them into crescendoes that occur at irregular intervals.

While the final "Melody" that swallows up half of the album's real estate may be a bit too much for most, even hardcore math rockers, the first half of the album is about as cool as a cucumber of a nerdfest as math rock can get. Personally i love the utter differences of the two halves of the album with the freeform noise rock antics of the second half creating a startlingly bizarre world of unpredictability.

I've truly never heard another math rock band that does it quite like TERA MELOS but then again there are many bands i've yet not encountered. For my money though, this eponymous debut album is quite the wild ride that keeps things stimulating through its entire demented run and if you're seeking a truly demanding and thoroughly exhausting musical workout that's not in the metal universe then this will satisfy those cravings for sure.