T.R.A.M. EMBARK ON AN “ENDEAVOR” WITH NEW TRACK

The release date of T.R.A.M.’s debut album Lingua Franca via Sumerian Records has been delayed, but that hasn’t stopped the label from releasing 4 minutes of an unmastered version of the track “Endeavor,” picked up by our fellow T.R.A.M. enthusiasts at Metal Injection. The band, of course, features Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes of Animals as Leaders, Adrian Terrazas formerly of The Mars Volta and Eric Moore of Suicidal Tendencies. We’ve been excited about this band ever since we saw them at SXSW, and while the Metal Injection-filmed live footage of that show was super-stellar it’s great to finally hear a studio version of something.

And it sounds exactly like I hoped it would. You can tell there’s a basic structure to the song — Section A, Section B, Section A, etc — but that within each section there’s no set script, and a pre-determined band member is free to improvise within the given framework. T.R.A.M. isn’t really so much a metal band as they are a jazz band with distorted guitars and shredding, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong that; the metal world needs to be turned upside down and shaken once in a while, and #2 Tosin Abasi on our list of the Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists is the perfect guy to do it.

-VN