Maelstrom Run

It's been a while since we ve heard from Tera Melos. 4 years to be exact. And, oh my, are they back with a vengeance. Trash Generator, the trio's third full length, is an astonishing blast of confidence and rejuvenation. It sounds as if the downtime has recharged the band with an entirely new sense of purpose. The performances are brilliant and sharp, the songs concise yet intricately detailed, and the album production deftly captures the band's strength as a live unit. Their dalliances with mellower psychedelic phrases on their previous two albums, X'ed Out (2013) and Patagonian Rats (2010) are significantly trimmed and instead utilized as colorations within a swirling maelstrom of righteous aggro punk-jazz abandon. Tera Melos guitarist/vocalist Nick Reinhart, bassist Nathan Latona and drummer John Clardy have learned to stop worrying and just be Tera Melos. 'We toured consistently for 19 months after X ed Out was released in 2013,' Latona explains. 'We did 2 full US headliners, 3 full US support tours, a Japanese tour, a month in Europe, and a run of shows in the UK and Ireland. When we finished, we were pretty exhausted and frustrated.' It had seemed that after all of that work, not much had changed for the band.

Winona Ryder delivers an unusually delicate performance as Patty, a fragile "bad girl" with a reckless streak and a haunted conscience, in Stacy Cochran's promising but ultimately disappointing follow-up to his playful My New Gun. Lukas Haas is the smitten prep school senior who risks expulsion when he rescues Patty from a riding accident and hides her in his dorm room. Cochran draws tender, vulnerable performances from both actors and beautifully orchestrates the hormonally charged maelstrom in the corridors of the boys' dorm as rumors of the forbidden "older woman" spread like wildfire…