UN: Let’s start from the beginning of the band. When did Coliseum come into fruition? Was the band started out of the need to play a faster style that wasn't really touched upon in any of other bands you are currently in?

Ryan: I'd had the itch to do another band for a while, but was always too busy to do it or just wasn't prepared to start writing songs for a new band and go about finding new members. I was also somewhat nervous about it - I knew that I wanted to sing in a band as well as play guitar, so it was daunting. It all came to a head when a few things with Black Cross, my other band, had some major changes come up. BC's singer Rob was getting married and would be able to tour less (he already couldn't tour during the school year due to his teaching job) and BC's bass player (my younger brother) Evan's other band Breather Resist started touring a lot more and signed to Jade Tree. It was obvious that Black Cross was going to be doing less than ever before, yet I wanted to be out touring more than ever before. Around this same time, I was feeling more and more distant from the world around me and getting more and more fed up with not only the bullshit going on with government / war / politics, but also the attitudes and lives of the average person in our country. Coupled with growing feelings of loneliness, disenchantment, anger, desperation... I just had to do a new band where I could express myself and get this out before I was ready to explode. The style of music just seemed to fit, it's a style of straight-ahead punk/hardcore that I'd never played before but had loved for years... I wanted to combine d-beat stuff like Discharge, Motorhead, Avskum, etc with heavier stuff like His Hero Is Gone and catchy punk like Turbonegro... Along with all of my lifelong influences like Black Flag, Bad Brains, Damned, and a million other classic punk bands. Plus we threw in some metallic guitar harmonies for good measure. That's about that, my cousin Matt Jaha went and bought a drum kit and started playing drums, my lifelong friend Keith Bryant picked up the bass, and Tony Ash, a guy who had been the best part of every short lived Louisville band he'd ever been in, picked up the guitar. That's that.

UN: Do you think that the straight-ahead style of punk is almost all but gone these days? It seems like most people wouldn’t even know who Discharge is these days but they were one of the most important bands in the history of punk music.

Ryan: I really don't think that's gone, it's just something that's farther under the surface of punk rock. You've got to dig deeper. Obviously Tragedy & From Ashes Rise are keeping that style of music alive in the biggest way, but there's also Wolfbrigade, Warcry, Avskum, Inepsy, and a million other bands doing it. It's just not gracing the cover of Alternative Press or popping up on the rosters of Trustkill or Ferret. In fact, d-beat punk bands seem to be very popular right now, or at least popular within some facet of the punk scene. But, you did hit on an interesting point; Discharge for some reason was left out of a lot of the hardcore history books. When I was growing up, I never saw Discharge stuff around and was never exposed to it until the last three or four years when I became more intent on exploring classic mid 70's to early 80's punk. I'm not why it was, probably because their records were out of print or because they were a more hardcore black sheep of British punk. It's sad that my friends and I grew up knowing sub-par British hardcore bands like Exploited and weren't able to really discover Discharge until we were in our 20's. That's changed now since all of the Discharge stuff has been reissued luckily.

UN: You manage to really spread out of tempos and make this album quite varied. Was it important to break away from the d-beat mold with every song? A lot of songs are definitely fast, but the tempo changes really help distinguish each track.

Ryan:Yeah, I certainly didn't want to write an entire record that was all d-beat stuff. The first few songs I wrote bit heavily from Motorhead & Avskum, then once we found ourselves as a band we were able to explore more. It wasn't really a conscious decision to say "let's not write all d-beat stuff” we just wrote songs and this is what came out. Some of the songs were written just days before we recorded them, the whole album was much more spontaneous than anything I’d ever done and thus rewarding in an entirely different way than other records I’ve done where we spent a year writing and two or three weeks recording. This was all done over the course of just a few months.

UN: I read that the album is the same recording as your demo but with more songs and a slightly cleaned up sound. Was any thought put into re-recording the songs or did the demo just sound good enough as is? Do you think mastering helped bring the song quality up to album standards?

Ryan: The initial idea was to record the album and release the first four songs were wrote as a demo, but we hadn’¹t written as many songs as we’d planned in time to get the demo out for our first shows and first tour. So, we recorded the first eight songs we wrote in February and hastily mixed four of them for the demo. Then we did four more songs (plus two covers) in April and put it all together for the album. Although it was recorded at different times it was all originally intended to be released together as an album. We mixed everything together in April and sent it off to Alan Douches at West West Side to master it. Alan did an AMAZING job of bringing the recording to life.

UN: Was it important to use an analog recording method? I don’t think this style of music would really come across with a modern sounding production.

Ryan: I’m just generally not a fan of computer based recording, in my experiences with Pro Tools, Nuendo, & Samplitude (which have usually been at home studios or with people who were novices with the programs) the recordings always end up sounding way too dry, brittle, soulless. I don’t worry too much about the analog vs. digital battle, because digital is far better for mixing and a number of other things. I just think that guitar, bass, and drums sound infinitely better on tape than recorded directly to software. With the Coliseum album, my idea was to record in the most stripped down, inexpensive, comfortable way possible. I’d become friends with Jason Loewenstein of Sebadoh who lives here and he’d recorded a Black Cross 7” at a studio where he does some work. The songs were recorded on Pro Tools and sounded decent, but I liked working with Jason more than I liked the outcome of those certain Black Cross songs. I also really, really loved Jason’s solo record on Sub Pop that he had recorded himself on an old Tascam 8-track 1/2” reel to reel. So I asked him if he’d like to come over to my house and record us on the 8-track. We used four tracks for drums (kick, snare, & two overheads), then three more for guitars and bass, after that we dumped it into Nuendo and did vocals & mixing at Jason’s house in his bedroom. I’m incredibly happy with the way it turned out ­ it’s not perfect, but it’s raw and heavy. It certainly doesn’t sound lo-fi, but absolutely doesn’t sound dry or overproduced. Most of my favorite punk records actually don’t sound all that great at all ­ it’s the music & heart that translates and stands the test of time despite the recording quality.

UN: Is it tough to choose which riff is more suitable for your different bands when writing music? There are a few riffs here and there on the Coliseum album that I think would totally fit into the Black Cross style. Do you have to be in certain mindsets to write for the different bands, or are there different songwriting approaches altogether?

Ryan: It’s getting to a point now where both bands are actively writing new songs that it gets a bit harder to figure out what goes where. Some choices are obvious, but sometimes it’s a little trickier. There are quite a few things that keep it separate. First off, the Coliseum album was written over just a couple of months and Black Cross wasn’t writing or practicing much during that time. I wanted to be mostly heavy, fast and loud with Coliseum and the drummer for Black Cross at the time, Sean, was very much not into playing anything heavy or fast. So it wasn’t too hard to decide what went where. Secondly, Black Cross songs are written together by Evan and I, we almost never write entire songs for BC on our own. BC doesnĀ¹t often do songs that are as straight forward as Coliseum’s songs either. There are things specifically with tuning and chords that can keep things separate, I use a different guitar with a different tuning for each band and that helps. But finally, it’s who is in each band that makes the real difference, while a riff might be somewhat similar in Black Cross & Coliseum, the general vibe of each band is different, Rob and I sing vastly differently, and the mindset for each band musically is obviously not the same ­ Black Cross wonĀ¹t be using a d-beat anytime soon and Coliseum won’t be doing any Drive Like Jehu inspired noise-rock songs either. The other guys in Coliseum are a very big part of the sound, Tony and I both come to practice with riffs or songs, then we’ll all arrange them and hash it out until it comes together. Matt’s also an amazing guitar player and will come up with ideas of chord changes, he and Keith are both musically trained as well and can put things together that I might not have come up with on my own.

UN: Was it a challenge to step up the microphone for this band? I’m not 100% sure but I think this is the first band that you have added vocals to. Does it limit what you can play on the guitar having to keep the vocals in mind? Not that Coliseum is really technical or anything.

Ryan: There are certain things I couldn’t play and sing at the same time, but so far I’ve been able to pull it off pretty well. We write the music first and, while ideas may pop into my head, I’m not initially thinking about whether I can sing over the guitar part or not. Once the song is done I figure out vocals from there. When weĀ¹re playing shows I realized that my main focus becomes singing rather than playing guitar, as long as I keep up with the drums the guitar playing isn’t a problem. This isn’t the first band I’ve sung for, in my first couple of bands way back in high school I was the singer. I gave up singing for bands 7 or 8 years ago, I’d been doing more melodic stuff along the lines of Seaweed or Replacements and my voice just wasn’t suited for it. I realized I was a much better guitar player than singer. But as the years went on, and I sang more and more backup parts in my other bands, I felt like I could try it again. It was a challenge, I’d never sang like this before, I hadn’t written lyrics in a very long time, I hadn’t been the frontman in a very long time. But it feels good, it feels right, and it’s been great.

UN: Tell us about the split with Lords. I think that the two bands are definitely different but also fit well together. Both bands are energetic and bring the rock.

Ryan: We came up with the idea to do a series of split 7”s of our little group of Louisville bands and Coliseum & Lords were going to be the first. Everyone in Coliseum and Lords kept toying around with different ideas and brainstorming ­ someone would suggest doing a cover, then someone would suggest covering each others songs, then finally the guys in Lords ran across the old Born Against / Screeching Weasel split where they wrote new songs for the other band to play. So we decided it would be cool to switch singers for a song. We’d planned on getting it out for the tour together in June, but then Coliseum went out for a short tour in May, then I went out to roadie for Breather Resist for a couple weeks after that and it seemed like there wouldn’t be time to get it done for the tour. Two weeks before the tour, my roommate Craig and I, who does Auxiliary Records with me, were talking about how getting the 7” out for tour would be infinitely better than releasing it after the tour. And we decided we could try to do. So I called up Stan from Lords, he called me back (and left the drunken message that’s on their side of the 7“), we finished writing our songs the next day, went into Chris from Lords studio the day after that, spent a couple days recording and mixing all the songs, sent it off to be pressed, screenprinted covers, got the records in the day of the Louisville tour kickoff shows, had some kids at the show help us glue & stuff the 7’s And that was that. I think the music on the record is great, but it was the collaborative effort of getting it all together that makes it so special.

UN: What can you tell us about the upcoming release on Manic Ride Records?

Ryan: We sent Jon from Manic Ride a demo and he dug it. It”s gonna be a 7 song EP on CD & 12” called “Goddamage.” We’re writing it now. We’re really psyched. It’ll be out in January.

UN: Would you consider Coliseum to be a full time band or just a project band? Are you guys gonna gauge it by how the response to the band is?

Ryan: Coliseum is a full time band, which was the intention from the beginning. I wanted to start a band that could tour year round because I was frustrated only touring during summer and winter breaks with Black Cross. Black Cross was originally intended to be a project band, but things went well for us and we found that we had a great chemistry, so we did more than we ever thought we would. Now, Black Cross will happen when we’re all home and all in the mood to do it, and tour occasionally when Rob has teaching breaks. Coliseum is who I am and what I do.