Killin' With A Smile

"The morale, as a whole, in the band has been great lately. And releasing the new music has been awesome… everyone's just stoked.”

When he sits down to chat, We Came As Romans' guitarist Joshua Moore is unfailingly upbeat about every topic we touch on. Sure, he's got reason to smile – the band's third record Tracing Back Roots is a thrill-ride of musical variation and exploration backed up by infectious melodies, and now the band's got a slot on the Australian Warped Tour to look forward to. But it's more than that. He says he's got that whole PMA thing that Bad Brains were always on about. In fact, he thinks that's something that's always defined We Came As Romans.

“Early on we established ourselves as this band with a positive mentality, and we really just wanted to inspire and influence people to live that way as well. Though our second CD was a little darker, by the end of the CD it was still a positive record because it was about dealing with negativity in a way to remain positive. So with this CD it's almost like we're over that, we've learnt and we've grown over the past five years.”

Moore follows by elaborating on the differences between the band's three records – their newbie Tracing Back Roots, 2011's Understanding What We've Grown to Be and 2009's To Plant A Seed. According to the lead guitarist, fans simply need to look to the title.

“With To Plant A Seed we were new as a band and naive. So the CD was written the way any CD would be written by a bunch of eighteen-year-olds; technically new adults but we were really just kids. Some of the lyrics I wrote when I was seventeen. Then after that came out and we were touring I found the darker side of the touring lifestyle. All the sacrifices we had to make to be on the road, just the negative things that come with any job, so our second CD was about figuring out how to be happy with life on the road and having a complete lack of stability in our lives. And then we come to Tracing Back Roots, and it's about looking back at where we've come from as a band, remembering all the experiences we've had along the way and then using that to move forward. Keep maturing as a band and as people.”

Moore furthers that it's not only from a lyrical perspective that We Came As Romans are tracing their heritage. The band's smartly woven music references what they've done in their career throughout Tracing Back Roots. “There are little things in each song that are throwbacks to [what] we've recorded before, like a cool clean guitar part that we did on Understanding or a lead that we did on our first CD… We try to make it subtle so it's one of those things where I could point something out to someone and they'd be like, 'Oh, yeah!'”

Beyond these references – some of which jump out, others which require a very keen ear – the record is perhaps Romans' most accessible. “I use the term 'radio-friendly' and everyone is super quick to wave the sell-out flag, but at the end of that day, that's what the album is. It's a lot more verse-chorus orientated. Dave [Stephens] our frontman, who traditionally only screams for us, is now singing with Kyle [Pavone] which has been awesome, [but] we still have heavy tracks on the album.”