Having just wrapped up a string of UK dates in support of their new album, An Ocean Between Us, As I Lay Dying are getting ready to hit even bigger than before. Their last album saw sales over 220k in the US and tours alongside the likes of Bullet For My Valentine in the UK. Now, for the band that sees themselves as metal band, yet with a great deal of punk and hardcore influence in both their music and ethics, everything rides upon how fans will pick up on the record, an album that sees the band writing songs much more diverse in nature than anything they have released before. John Consterdine caught up with drummer Jordan Mancino to find out more:

As I Lay Dying

How’s it going?

JM - : It’s going good, a little tired, a little jet-lagged still. 

“An Ocean Between us” came out in the last week or so, it seems much more diverse compared with the older stuff, was that planned when you were writing the album?

JM - Yeah definitely. The last record “Shadows Are Security”, was a more focused album, partly because we had to write it in such a short amount of time but with this album we wanted to get across a lot of different styles of metal in the music, there’s a lot of thrash elements, slower, darker stuff, melodic stuff. As well as being diverse we tried to make the songs real songs not just part after part after part. The songs actually capture you in a certain way.

Was the album an attempt to break away from the Metalcore scene?

JM - I dunno, I mean the scene is what it is you know. I think whether or not a band is a certain style or stuck in a certain style or categorised in a certain genre or whatever but a good record is a good record and good songs are good songs, no matter if there’s a melodic riff or a breakdown or a Metalcore riff, a good song is a good song. We’re still the same band, we’re still a metal/hardcore band I guess, but that’s like the category we got lumped into. We just wanted to write good songs more than anything. 

Adam Dutkiewicz from Killswitch Engage produced the album, how did he contribute to the recording process?

JM - He was really good at getting the best performance out of each of us. The whole album was pretty much written before we got in the studio with him. We already knew what we wanted for most of the songs but there was one song in particular that he helped arrange and traded some ideas. Other than that all the songs were pretty much the same as they were in the pre-production it was just little things like a drum fill here or a guitar riff there or harmony here. But mainly he helped with getting the performance and making sure everything was spot on.

Last year you released “A Long March”, which compiled all the earlier releases together, was that for the fans so that they could hear the older material?

JM - Yeah. We stopped printing the old CDs and then we started finding out that people had this desire to hear them and we had people coming up to us like, “I just paid seventy bucks on eBay for one of your old records” and we were like that’s stupid, don’t do that. So yeah that’s exactly why we did it, we put it out so people wouldn’t get taken advantage of on eBay, you know some guy who has nothing better to do than sell a CD that’s worth fifteen dollars for sixty dollars. We put it out there for people that wanted to hear it, we didn’t make a big deal about it we just put it out.

Something I’ve noticed lately is that in your album artwork and on t-shirts, you have lots of skulls on them, is there any particular reason or is it just to fit in with the bands name?

JM - Well, Jacob Bannon has done all of our album covers thus far and for each album we wanted to stick with a theme so that when people see the record, even if it doesn’t have our name on it they’ll know its an As I Lay Dying record just by the way it looks. You know like erm…

…A bit like Iron Maiden?

JM - Yeah exactly, whether or not Iron Maiden’s name is on it, you know it’s an Iron Maiden record, it’s an association. But yeah we like to keep a theme, but who knows the next album we might do something different, we’ll see. 

You have a new bass player (Josh Gilbert), do you think he has slotted into the band well?

JM - Yeah, this is his fourth tour with us. I think live we’re all still getting comfortable with each other because the rest of us have been playing together for years and years so it’s a harder situation for him to come into because we’ve been playing together for so long and he has to catch up and stuff, but he did amazing in the studio, he sang on the record and he played bass on the record which is a first for us, Phil our guitar player recorded bass on the last album and our guitarists have always recorded bass and we’ve always had friends to come in and do guest vocals on all the clean stuff. So it was an awesome experience with him, he’s the first bass player we’ve ever had to perform and sing on the record so it was really cool.

For this tour you’ve brought along Himsa, Darkest Hour and Architects, which is an awesome line up, where did the idea for this tour come from?

JM - The first idea was to do a headline tour and usually the way it works is you put the word out to say your going on tour and you get submissions to see what bands might be interested. This is our first tour with Darkest Hour, we’ve always liked their band and with Himsa we’ve toured with those guys so many times and we’re really good friends with those guys and it seemed like a great opportunity to get Darkest Hour out here and Himsa and Architects, I just met those guys for the first time actually and they’re really cool and they kind of bring a UK fan base to the shows that none of the other bands could bring. I think everybody is really adding something to the tour and the vibe’s really good, so it’s cool. 

This year you also did Warped Tour and last year you did Sounds of the Underground and Taste Of Chaos all in the States and also the Bullet For My Valentine tour over here, was that to spread the word out about the band a bit more?

JM - Yeah definitely, the headline tours are playing for our fans and the support tours and festival tours are really a chance to play in front of new people. We did a lot of great tours last year it was all so fun, there were a lot of awesome bands.

The Bullet For My Valentine tour got the name out about you guys a lot more because so many people saw those shows.

JM - Yeah that was a great tour; those guys do very well over here so it was awesome that they took us out.

Finally we can we expect from you for the rest of this year and early next year?

JM - After this tour we’re going to Japan and Thailand and then we’re going to the US to do a headline tour, after that we’re not really sure yet. Take December off, spend Christmas at home, and then after that we’ll probably do some more US stuff, hit Australia and stuff. In the last year we have mainly been over here, this is like our fourth time here in a year so we’ve got to start touring the states a little bit more and the other parts of the world. This has been a spot for us in the past year, we wanted to play here as much as we could, so we want to focus on other places then maybe in spring or summer time we’ll come back over here.

An Ocean Between Us is out now via Metal Blade and you can read the HRH review via this link. To find out more about the album, and the band then you can visit the following site:

www.asilaydying.com

www.metalblade.com