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OK So this was a weird one. First I get this first-class promo package from a band I did not recall giving my address to. Then I start reading the bio and run into comparisons with Tool. Oh. Shit. Yet, most reviews quoted in the promo package drew comparisons with 80s metal, thrash, Priest and Pantera (OK this one's a yuk too.) Add to this the fact that I've never run into the band on any of the metal sites I visit nor the magazines I read. I was seriously afraid of a mallcore invasion, so I took my sweet little time before giving this a listen...

TEOS stands for "The Evil Operating System" (don't ask.) I've seen much weirder names. I guess they couldn't call themselves Windows. Anyway, I finally pop this in and frankly if I had stopped at the first song, I would have thought that my initial fears were justified - well, almost anyway, as this is more of a "aggro metal" or whatever type of sound, say a step or two above mallcore but not much higher. It's tolerable, but definitely not something I'd want to hear too often. Alright, so there's four songs left. Thankfully, things get much better after this first quasi-horrible song. Call it a mix of power, thrash and straightforward heavy metal, along with overall very clean vocals (the singer does quite a damn good job on most of the takes, and sometimes even sounds a bit like the singer of German power metal band Mob Rules.) That's a far cry from the whiny screechy daddy-raped-me mallcore-type vocals I was expecting! :) The music is quite varied, with some real good guitar parts at times (from near-thrash to near-prog - "near" because they never get close enough to a genre to be thrown into it.) Aggressive, melodic, relax and angry - All of this happen within the span of 22 minutes which the band have used very well to showcase their abilities and diversity (which, by the way, makes them kind of unclassifiable category-wise...) I'll repeat what some others have already said, this is too short.

Oddly, this recording is a couple of years old and there hasn't been much signs of these guys anywhere. Hopefully these guys are working on a full-length that will show whether they can keep up the quality for a good 45+ minutes (please junk any material that sounds like the first song, however!) In the meantime, this is a demo worth checking out.