Sep 082016
 

tardive-dyskinesia-harmonic-confusion-cover

 

We have some history with this band from Greece, Tardive Dyskinesia, whose name sent me off googling its meaning after the first song I heard from the band turned me goggle-eyed. That was in December 2009, only one month after we launched this site. I had just discovered the band’s second album, The Sea of See Through Skins, based on a review in DECIBEL magazine which proclaimed, “There hasn’t been a group of this caliber from Hellas since Septicflesh reemerged in 2008 with the ruling Communion album.”

That first post I wrote about the band (here), which included what I found from my google searches about the origin of their name, has been followed by many others. The years have passed, and the fortunes of Tardive Dyskinesia have risen, with appearances at such festivals as Euroblast and the UK Tech-Metal Fest and praise from the likes of George Kollias (Nile), Jocham Jacobs (ex-Textures), and Kelly Shaefer (Atheist). Along the way, they’ve released a third album (2012’s Static Apathy in Fast Forward), and now they’re on the verge of releasing a fourth — Harmonic Confusion — which we’re giving you the chance to hear in its entirety in advance of its official September 9 release by Playfalse Records. Continue reading »

Feb 012015
 

 

I took a break from my work this morning to take a quick look for new music that might be interesting, and I found some songs that I thought were worth recommending. I still don’t have much time to myself, so once again I’m not able to write quite as much about the music as I normally do. I realize it won’t sound as good without me explaining why it sounds good, but somehow, you will have to make do.

TARDIVE DYSKINESIA

The Greek band Tardive Dyskinesia, who I’ve been following for a very long time, just released a new single named “The Electric Sun“, and it comes with a video. It’s one of 10 songs the band are developing for a new album that they’re projecting for release at the end of this year. Continue reading »

Nov 132013
 

You really can’t accuse this site of being too narrow-minded, despite that thing about no clean singing, which we obviously don’t mean literally these days. We cast a wide net for our metal, catching all manner of shiny fish from a multitude of genres. But today I thought I’d feature new songs and videos I’ve come across in recent days that are outside even our expansive boundaries, or at least on the fringes. Before I mix my metaphors any further, let’s get to it:

OCELOT OMELET

Ocelot Omelet are a Seattle band whose music is difficult to describe. At one point they termed their sound “pseudo-retro tele-gothic psycho-hippie filth-punk”. Based on their first album, 2011’s Elliptical Optusion, that’s really not a bad description, as difficult as it may be to grapple with as an abstract concept. But based on their most recent recording, I think they’ll have to work the word “metal” into it some way.

Earlier this year, Ocelot Omelet recorded a new three-song EP by the name of Present In the Dark, with the legendary Jack Endino handling the engineering work. Two versions were mastered, one for vinyl and one for digital, and the band have now successfully completed a kickstarter campaign to finance pressing of the EP on 180 gram vinyl. I heard some of this new material performed live last summer, and I left with a severe case of headbanger’s neck. Continue reading »

Mar 272013
 

Yesterday, in a post devoted to recent metal art, I included the piece you see above (created by Manster Designs). It mysteriously appeared, without explanation, on the FB page of a Greek band I admire named Tardive Dyskinesia. If I’d only waited a day . . . because now the band have revealed what it’s all about.

The artwork was created for a “new” single named (of course) “Crawling In the Mud”. The song was originally recorded during the 2008 studio sessions that produced the band’s 2009 debut album, the terrific The Sea of See Through Skins, but it was not included on the official release of that album by Coroner Records. As of today, the band have made the song available for free download in a package that also includes two live tracks — “We, the Cancer” (from the band’s latest album Static Apathy In Fast Forward) and “Complicity” (from The Sea of See Through Skins) — plus a high-res version of the above artwork and a band photo and logo.

I’m just going to focus on that “ghost” song “Crawling In the Mud” because I hadn’t heard it before today. Continue reading »

Mar 262013
 

Here’s another installment of things I saw and heard over the last 24 hours while merrily rambling along the by-ways of the interhole. The theme of this installment is METAL ART RULES!

TARDIVE DYSKINESIA

This Greek band’s debut release The Sea of See Through Skins was one of my favorite albums of 2009. One version of the album apparently included a bonus track named “Crawling Through the Mud”, though I don’t think it was on the copy of the CD I bought; at least I don’t see it on my iPod, which is where I transferred the music from the disc before eventually storing the CD away with a gazillion others that my spouse made me remove from our cluttered house.

And that’s all I can say about the wonderful artwork above that mysteriously appeared on Tardive Dyskinesia’s Facebook page yesterday. I don’t know who created it, and I don’t know what music it will eventually accompany. Maybe the band is about to release that bonus track as a single?

Anyway, the band’s 2012 album Static Apathy In Fast Forward ain’t too shabby either. Here’s TD’s cool official video, released earlier this month, for “Time Turns Planets” from that album. Prepare for a spine-jolting, head-scrambling experience. Continue reading »

Oct 232012
 

I found many new metallic abominations to like over the last 24 hours, too many to shoehorn into a single post. So I’ll make a start with this batch of sharp spiky European offerings from Aeon (Sweden), Tardive Dyskinesia (Greece), and Zubrowska (France). Don’t touch, now, or you may draw back a bleeding stump.

AEON

Still loving the fantastic album art up above, by  Kristian “Necrolord” Wåhlin. It’s for Aeons Black, the fourth album from Sweden’s Aeon, which Metal Blade will release on Nov 19 in Europe and Nov 20 everywhere else. As previously reported, the title track is available for free download here. You can also catch an official lyric video for the same song at the end of KevinP’s recent NCS interview of the band’s founding guitarist Zeb Nilsson at this location.

Today’s news is that another song from Aeons Black premiered today. It’s streaming at Metal Hammer’s web site. The song is the album’s first track, “Still They Pray”. It’s lacerating, the kind of death metal that leaves skin in tatters. Go here to listen, and then come back and thank us for pointing you in that direction. Continue reading »

Jun 182012
 

I should probably apologize for using that overworked Homeric phrase in the post title, but those really were the first words that popped into my addled head when I heard the music featured here over the last 24 hours. I listened to songs from both bands back-to-back, and by coincidence they’re both from Greece, and by further coincidence the music from both is really good — though tremendously different from each other.

TARDIVE DYSKINESIA

We’ve written frequently about Tardive Dyskinesia and various side projects of their members after first being grabbed in a bear hug by the fast-paced, infectious barrage of technically sophisticated music captured on their 2009 album, The Sea of See Through Skins. At long last, 2012 will see the release of their follow-up album, Static Apathy in Fast Forward. In late March, they started streaming a rough mix of a new song called “Prehistoric Man” (featured here), and today brings us an animated lyric video for yet another track, “Time Turns Planets”.

Plunging almost immediately into a neck-wrenching groove, the song lurches and punches its way through a cycle of syncopated riffs and off-beat rhythms, but smooths out in a memorable melodic chorus, blending the ethereal and the heavy quite effectively. Fans of Texture’s 2011 album Dualism ought to pay particular attention to this fusion of piston-driven machine complexity and soaring ambience. The video is fun to watch, too (right after the jump). Continue reading »

Mar 292012
 

In this post, two bands with new music, both swimming in the same musical sea. One old favorite and one new discovery: Tardive Dyskinesia (Greece) and NEOSIS (Switzerland).

TARDIVE DYSKINESIA

Our attachment to this band goes back to the early days of NCS when we featured their 2009 album Sea of See Through Skins in a post about “math metal” (a post that also included Textures, CiLiCe, and Hacride). What a quaint term “math metal” now seems. Those were the days before the term “djent” polluted our vocabulary, before everyone’s neighbor began writing off-kilter pneumatic riffs a la Meshuggah and calling them “songs”.

It’s been a long wait for a new TD album, though the band have periodically given us reasons to remember them, including a free recording of a live performance (featured here). But now they’re beginning the ramp-up process for release of their third album, Static Apathy in Fast Forward, which is due later this year. Recently, they started streaming a rough mix of a new song called “Prehistoric Man”, which will appear (though possibly in altered form) on the new album, and I’m really digging it.

The song features to good effect the band’s blend of turbulent, head-twisting rhythms and progressive-minded instrumental passages that first attracted us to them years ago, with perhaps a more prominent place for melody and a few other added ingredients as well. There’s quite a lot of clean singing in the song, though the mixing of clean and harsh vocals also appeared now and then on Sea of See Through Skins, but I think it works well in “Prehistoric Man”. Continue reading »

Jan 162012
 

I was afraid it would come to this eventually.

Metal bands try all sorts of come-on’s in an effort to increase their Facebook “likes”. They ask politely. They plead and beg pathetically. They get their friends in other bands to solicit “likes” on their behalf. They dangle the carrot of a new song, or album art, or a track list, if their total “likes” reach a certain magic number.

These kind of inducements are too fuckin’ lame (or too tame) for Greek math-metal band Tardive Dyskinesia, who we’ve written about a lot at NCS. A few months back, they posted this status on their FB wall: “The next 38 guys who like us on facebook will win a lollipop licked from all the band members! What are you waiting for…!!” I’d already liked their page or I definitely would have gone for that. Just what I’ve always wanted.

But that was just a warm-up for a status they posted last week. I think you can guess what they offered. As “like” solicitations go, “we suck cocks for a like” was short, to-the-point, and very friendly. It was also the logical next level in “like” solicitations.

I’ve had fun watching the NCS “like” total increasing on our Facebook page. We crossed 1,000 “likes” last week, and that was definitely a good time, but it will probably take a while to reach 2,000 or even 1,500, because there’s a limited number of geniuses in the world. I’d like to get there faster. Taking inspiration from Tardive Dyskinesia, I’m now thinking about NCS offering blowjobs for “likes”. Continue reading »

Nov 052011
 

Universe217 is an experimental doom metal band from Athens, Greece. They’ve released two albums, a self-titled debut in 2007 and Familiar Places in 2011. I found out about this band through a Facebook post by another Greek band, Tardive Dyskinesia, whose music I know and like a lot (I’ve written about them many times at NCS, including this post). So far, I’ve listened to a grand total of two songs by Universe217, and those songs were performed as a single work for purposes of an unusual video.

The video was shot on a mountain outside Athens called Aloula, which is perhaps most famous because it’s the place where much of the marble used to build the Parthenon was quarried. The band and the film crew hiked with all the gear up the mountain for about 20 minutes, then set up and played. The performance was recorded live. Joining Universe217 were a couple of guest musicians — the vocalist from Tardive Dyskinesia (Manthos), who played guitar in this performance, and the drummer for a band called Need (Petros), combining with Universe217’a own drummer for a dual attack.

The video performance combines two songs — “Nothing” from Familiar Places and “66” from the band’s self-titled debut. The music isn’t as extreme as most of the music we cover at NCS, but it has a haunting quality that I found appealing, and I also just think it’s cool that they did this in one take, performing live on a mountain outside Athens. I was also impressed with the vocals of the band’s frontwoman Tania. Most of her singing is clean, though as the song builds in intensity she eventually kicks into some nice harsh crescendos. Check this out after the jump. Continue reading »