In-depth Interview With Ramming Speed

By Andrew Bansal

Boston MA-based road warriors Ramming Speed are easily one of the most active touring bands in metal oday, and fittingly appropriate to their name, they’re hitting the scene hard. Having been around for the best part of 6 years and building themselves from the ground up, the band got signed to Prosthetic Records earlier this year and released their second full-length album ‘Doomed To Destroy, Destined To Die’ in June. With a smooth blend of metal, punk and hardcore, they have a little something for everybody. Currently, they’re on a North American run in support of North Carolina party-mongers Valient Thorr. They stopped by at the Roxy Theatre on September 17 for what turned out to be a great show, and before Ramming Speed went on stage I sat down with drummer Jonah Livingston and guitarist Kallen Bliss for a light-hearted chat. Check out the conversation below and do not miss Ramming Speed the next time they come through your town.

You guys have been out on this tour with Valient Thorr for a week-and-a-half now. How’s everything been going so far?

Jonah: So far it’s been pretty awesome, man. The only issue really is that the drives have been really brutal. We’ve been doing 8-12 hour drives almost everyday. But a lot of the shows have been really good, like Denver was rad. We did New York at the beginning without Valient Thorr and that was really good. So it’s been a handful of really good shows and a lot of the highway (laughs).

Who does the driving? Do you all take turns?

Kallen: It’s mainly me, Ben and the singer Peter. Jonah drives whenever it’s his turn to be the designated driver.

Jonah: I drive only when I absolutely have to.

Kallen: He’s really bad at driving!

Jonah is doing enough physical work with the drumming anyway, right?

Jonah: Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about (laughs).

Even before this tour, you did an East Coast run with Valient Thorr and Gypsyhawk. So you’re pretty familiar with the band by now I guess.

Jonah: Oh yeah, it’s really cool. I think we were a week into that last tour when they asked us if we wanted to come out with them again. So I think we’re just getting along really well. They’re awesome dudes and a great live band. So it’s cool hanging out with them, and apparently we did a good enough job at the beginning of last tour that they wanted to keep hanging out with us. I guess we didn’t smell too bad!

Your musical style is a blend of so many things that you can pretty much tour with anybody you like and I think you’re discovering that.

Jonah: Yeah, we were out with Goatwhore before this one, so that’s like a pretty good example of diversity of bands that would let us tour with them.

Kallen: I like touring with any band, whether it be metal or hardcore. It’s cool, and because of the kind of shit we play it makes sense to be able to tour with any kind of band.

Jonah: I think we’re really lucky in that respect. A lot of bands get boxed in. There are bands that only do hardcore tours or only do death metal tours. We’re lucky that by accident we started playing the kind of music that lets us hang out with different bands and stuff. It rules!

Would you be able to do death metal tours as well? I don’t know if there’s death metal in your music.

Jonah: We do have blast beats and it’s definitely grindy. So I think we do have a little bit of death metal in there, for sure.

Kallen: Yeah we can do a little bit of that, I think.

Jonah: It all really just depends on what the headliners think and how the fans react to it.

Kallen: We have played songs that are more death metal than others, but on this tour we kind of picked out our songs that have more of a rock n’ roll party vibe. If we did a death metal tour we could just do the punishing fast crushing songs.

Jonah: On the Goatwhore/Revoction tour, we tried to pick songs that had the most blasting in them, because that’s what kids want to hear on that tour so let’s give them what they want to hear! You don’t want to make kids listen to something they don’t necessarily want to listen to. But we still threw in a couple of rock n’ rollers in there, like on this tour we’re throwing in a couple of grinders. So we do a little bit of everything but we want to make sure everyone is having a good time.

You should tour on a full-on death metal package, like tour with Deicide or something and blow them off the stage. Well, they suck anyway so I’m sure you’ll be able to.

Jonah: (Laughs) No comment.

Kallen: We played with Vital Remains one time.

They’re way better than Deicide.

Jonah: I agree with you. But that went .. I don’t know .. it was alright (laughs).

Kallen: Yeah, that was just one show in Boston, years ago. It was alright. It was very not well attended, at all.

I can imagine. But what I wanted to ask you about this musical style is, was it a deliberate plan or strategy to come up with it when you started the band or is it just a natural mix of sounds that come together from all members?

Jonah: I think it’s just totally natural. Everyone in this band likes different kinds of extreme music even though we do like the same stuff too. Like Kallen went through a period when he was only listening to Swedish D-beat hardcore for like a year or two. So obviously that’s where his songwriting started going. Our guitar player Blake joined a couple of years ago and his songs are a lot more death metal, kind of weird spider-hand stuff with blasting. So yeah, it’s not like anyone is trying to force their opinion on everyone else. I came up in the Boston hardcore scene so that’s kind of like how I play drums sometimes. So all of us have a place we’re coming from and we all argue with each other until the songs make sense and everyone’s happy.

You got signed to Prosthetic Records this year and your new album was released by them. Over the years they’ve supported a lot of great bands and have pushed smaller bands to get to the next level. Gojira and Lamb Of God are just a couple of examples of bands who graduated from Prosthetic. So it’s a good label to be associated with, isn’t it?

Jonah: When we started talking to them, that’s exactly one of the things that was most exciting. I remember Kylesa play in living rooms and they’re another one of those bands. There are so many bands that started off tiny or may be just playing regular rock bands and then through Prosthetic they signed to a bigger label and went on to do big things. I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to happen to us or what we want, but it’s cool seeing a label having bands that all sound completely different and push them to way bigger things.

After this tour, what’s your plan? Will you continue being an active touring band?

Kallen: Yeah, we’re going to tour as much as we possibly can. After this tour, we have a couple of shows here and there, then we go down to Florida to play The Fest, which is mainly like a pop-punk fest but it sounds fun. We’re the only metal band this year.

Jonah: It’s like imagine South By South West only had melodic hardcore and pop-punk bands. But again, that’s another example of us being able to fit in anywhere. This is our second year playing it. It has something like 300 bands over 3 or 4 days, and it’s huge. It’s kind of cool that they’re having us play it. It just shows that we can kind of play with all the kids in the sandbox.

You guys come from Boston. Over there, do you have more bands similar to your style or do you stand out as something that’s odd or unique?

Kallen: Boston is very divided. There’s metal bands, thrash metal bands, death metal bands, hardcore bands. So basically bands over there stay true to a particular style.

Jonah: The metal scene isn’t huge, so you’ll find like 3 black metal bands, 3 death metal bands, and stuff like that. We try to play shows with some raw punk bands and then some shows with cleaner hardcore kids. We try and hop around in that scene but I think in a lot of ways kids in Boston pick something they like and try and stick with it.

In future albums, where do you see your music going? Will it continue to be a mix of these styles or do you think you’ll bring in more styles?

Jonah: I can’t really imagine mixing in too much more (laughs).

Kallen: I’ve been listening to a lot of gangster rap the past couple of years. So may be some rap metal on the next record, possibly.

Jonah: We’re already written five or six songs for the next record and they definitely don’t sound the same as the ones on this record but it has the same influences, may be a Slayer part, then a Nasum part and a Thin Lizzy part. So the songs are different but we’re not going to throw in jazz or dubstep or anything stupid like that. That’s not what makes sense for our kind of music. We’ll stick to what works. But you heard it here first, Kallen is rapping on the next record (laughs).

Related – Gig Review: Valient Thorr Headlines The Roxy

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