The idea of having Metal as a genre to become somewhat of a movement is an interesting one. Releasing their brand new album Svbversvm this year, we welcome back RAM to the scene. Delvering classic Heavy Metal sounds with stories similar to the classic Escape From New York style. The minority is constantly against the collective, we were able to speak to the bands vocalist Oscar Carlquist for a real low down on what the entire process behind creating the album was like, what the overlying themes might be and the esoteric value of Metal as a movement itself. Listen to the unedited interview below this excerpt!
For example you have just mentioned the “Forbidden Zone”, where do you take influence for coming up with ideas like that?
Well the idea for “Forbidden Zone” was because I had been saying the same thing so many times, the individual versus the collective. I have been saying it for ten or twelve songs throughout our career. It’s this thing that always returns and I read about the old Greeks how they didn’t rule the people through politics they actually ruled them through theatre. They actually realised that when a politician speaks, then the people will shut their ears off because they know that he is trying to influence them. So they would put all the stuff that they wanted people to do, the morals that they wanted people to have and how they wanted to act and respond into their plays. When the audience would go to the theatre then they would lower their defences and then take in what was said because they were enjoying themselves. They were at this spectacle, so I thought that I would do the same thing but in a song lyric. So I would make some kind of differences, with my own style so to speak.
So it’s kind of an almost subconscious sort of act, is that correct?
Yeah, yeah!
So could you tell us about the writing process behind the record?
The writing process was mainly how we always do. Me and Harry, it used to be me and Harry and Daniel but he quit the band in early 2013. So it’s me and Harry, we don’t like writing in the rehearsal space because it’s too loud, you really can’t think. We like to sit around with our coffee and biscuits and work in a bit of a quieter surrounding so that we can discuss what we’re doing and really get nerdy about writing Metal songs and nerdy about music in general.
It’s a more relaxed kind of thing when we do songs, instead of 100 watts on the guitar amplifier in the rehearsal space. So it makes us more creative I’m certain, we do write things in the rehearsal room but that’s after some jamming when something comes up. We save it and then we take it to the other place anyway. That’s the way we like to work and it was no different this time, we did it the same old way! It was a bit harder to write songs this time, for the other albums we had a lot of stuff that we wrote when we had an abundance of time before we were touring before we had anything released all we did five days a week was writing songs. So we had a lot of in our cupboards up to the Death album but for this one we had to write everything from scratch it was a little bit tougher but I think this is our best release yet.
The conversation picks up again at 8:00 and you can listen to the full interview to hear Oscar’s esoteric thoughts on the Metal movement as a whole and the power of music to truly move an audience below!
Ram’s new album Svbversvm is out now via Metal Blade.
