Boston-based rock band Rubikon have been together nearly 15 years,  but it's their most recent album, Delta, that's catching most buzz. Recorded live over two weekends in Tennessee, the set merges retro rock riffs with melodic metal. Rubikon premieres their latest video, “Vipers” on Myspace, but it's the single “Live That Lie” that reflects where the band members are in their lives, both musically and personally. As vocalist Doug Arsham puts it, “We're older, we care a lot less about what people think, and we are definitely a more weathered and resilient version of our younger selves.”

Guitarist Dave Raymond talks about how Rubikon has evolved through the years and where the music is taking them now. 

Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts

Homebase: We are all scattered to the wind – one in LA, one in Cleveland, one in NYC, and two of us are still in Boston.

How did you all meet?

Rubikon formed from the ashes of a pair of Boston bands that had gigged together a bunch in the early 2000s.  Things fell apart and Rubikon was born from those bands. So, we met by sharing the stage together a bunch of times, we got along really well, and when our former bands dissolved we decided to give it a go.  Fourteen years later, and here we (still) are.

Thundering metal is an apt description of your music. How did you discover your sound?

We’ve all been musically active since a young age, yeah, and we all have interesting musical backgrounds that blend nicely in Rubikon – from playing trumpet in the school jazz band to Grateful Dead-following jam band roots, we’ve got it all.

The major overlap for us all is that we all love classic rock and roll, blues and soul music.  A subset of the five of us loves metal, some love hip-hop, and others love country.  Roll it all together and you’ve got a rock and roll band.

Fourteen years is a long time to be a band. What was the point where you realized you wanted to take  music seriously, as a career?

We were serious from day one, and soon after forming we were playing together pretty much every day.  I think it helped us become a really tight live band, and of course it helped us jam well together and compose on the fly.  Plus, you just develop a deep bond with folks when you’re pushing forward toward a common goal – that’s probably our secret sauce.  Not Thousand Island dressing, or a combo of ketchup and mayonnaise.  Our sauce is that we all love making music together.

Now that we are distributed across the country, all that hard work has paid off – we can get together after months of not playing together and be show-ready in a matter of hours.  It’s pretty amazing how that works, I have to say.

Who are your biggest musical influences?

This is always a tough one to answer, but here are MY biggest influences – Pantera and Blind Melon are my favorite bands.  I also love Zeppelin, Down, Tool, early Megadeth, System of a Down, Sepultura, Slayer, Phish, Testament, The Doors, Metallica (of course), the first four Mastodon albums, the Mars Volta, RATM, Mos Def, the Beatles, Cave In, and a brilliant band of friends from Maine that used to go by DonnyBrook (and later, Red Cloud Revival).  Sabbath and Ozzy’s solo material as well. I could surely go on.

Oh OK, and I will – Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Wu Tang Clan, etc.

Where is the name Rubikon from? What does it mean?

Some gal in a bar in NYC told us we should call ourselves that, so … we did.  True story.  It worked out though since “crossing the Rubicon” refers to a “point of no return” – and at the time we had jumped into the project with our full energy, so it felt like we were all in.  So if you know your history (and I don’t, so we’ll wing it), when Julius Caesar was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire he was ordered not to extend his influence past the Rubicon, which is a river in Italy.  He crossed it to fight the Gauls, he won, and that was really the start of his march to power.

Historians may disagree with me, but I find this half-truth to be good enough for our band mythology.

And of course we changed the “c” in Rubicon to a “k”, because history has proven that if you misspell your band name, you’re destined to succeed.  Nobody would have listened to The Beetles or Deaf Leopard if they’d been spelled correctly.

You talk about being older and wiser as a band. How is that reflected in your music--especially in Delta?

With Delta, we took the time to explore.  We crafted songs, came back to them, gutted them, rebuilt them, and basically tried to approach them from as many angles as possible.  When we originally wrote “Wasting Time”, the middle section was full-blast rock, all distortion and thunder.  Over time, it felt like that part was coming out of nowhere, that it didn’t quite have the right vibe for the rest of the song.  So we picked up a banjo, stomped our feet, clapped our hands and that was that.

In the past, I’m not sure we would have been patient enough to explore our music to that extent.

Why is your album called Delta? What themes were you working on when making it?

The Greek letter delta means “change” in the science world.  We liked the sound of that.  We considered “Delta Force” but didn’t want Chuck Norris to throttle us for hijacking the name of his stellar film from the 80s.  So we kept it short and sweet – and safe.  Delta.

 Describe your music to someone who's never heard you before.

It’s a steady trickle of swamp mud oozing out of an old radiator.

What's the biggest struggle/challenge you've had to overcome as a band? 

Writing when we’re geographically separated is challenging, and though we send riffs and song ideas around, all the real work happens when we lock ourselves in our band room for a weekend of writing.  You can get a lot done with a bucket of cold beers and 10-14 hour days of steady work.

Does that affect your songwriting process? What is it like, writing songs when you all live apart from each other?

Like a glacier marching to the sea.  It takes FOREVER.  But we ultimately calve off some gigantic slabs of iceberg-music once we finally get there, and the splash they make when they hit the water is pretty fucking awesome.