Both lurking in the nastier end of crossover thrash, trying not to make eye contact with some of the gormless meatheads gurning blankly out from underneath flip-brimmed Suicidal caps, Boston's Ramming Speed and Texas' ANS look like characters from 'Repo Man', but sound like a squat door being kicked in by the fuzz. This isn't gigglesome party thrash with ball pools and jelly, this is party thrash with fatalities and arrests - and two house bands.ANS have honed their sound to muscular tautness since their 2009 third full-length 'Pressure Cracks' put them at the top of the crucial new shit list. In the internal battle that bands of this ilk face between feedback whine hardcore and precision guided thrash – essentially is it 'more punk' or 'more metal' – the latter is beginning to dominating their output, riding the Outbreak/Vitamin X-style neo-old school hardcore chug around their four tracks like a charging pony. It's largely slight of hand, the real difference is that it's cleaner and less crusty, and some extended guitar masturbation on fourth track 'Roehrs' War', but genre is 98% perception anyway so embrace it.
Ramming Speed meanwhile continue to proudly devolve into toxic old school death/grind territory like an apple decaying away into a heap of ashen crud on a time lapse film. The message seems to have not reached them that this path isn't one of the two options as dictated by the holy writ of DRI. Though guitar heroics and buzzing crossover riffs hold the the whole thing firmly in place like burly orderlies on a lunatic, the rot has well and truly set in.
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