Boston thrashers RAMMING SPEED are back and have used their trials and triumphs of the road to hone their sound. AL BULMER asks JONAH LIVINGSTON about being the bastard child of Disfear and Thin Lizzy

It’s not that Ramming Speed’s Prosthetic debut ‘Destined to Die, Doomed to Destroy’ is unfathomable, you know damn well what’s assaulting your aural senses, but it’s the effortless finesse that such a hybridised mishmash is executed. Not that these Bostonians are attempting to forge gold from lead through some contrived reggae-black metal or similar hypothetical nonsense, it’s their genius smelting of a revolutionary yet idiosyncratic alloy: neo-thrash, a blistering tour-de-force of NWOBHM-meets-grind-meets-D-beat bound to a thrash carbon base, which, put in layman’s term, fucking rules.

As skin-thumping timekeeper Jonah Livingston elaborates, the push from a party thrash band releasing a 7” followed by touring to the contemporary beast we witness today was the laboured result of a forced pragmatism. “The biggest catalyst for us as a recorded band was losing a couple of band members two or three years ago,” he explains. “We used to jump at any chance to tour, like, ‘some dude wants us to play a fest in the middle of the woods in … Read More