Wrath of Vesuvius – The Highwire Daze Legacy Interviews

Wrath of Vesuvius: Raging At The Cobalt Cafe

Originally Posted: 02/27/14

The mighty Wrath of Vesuvius brought their death metal rage to the Cobalt Cafe for a co-headlining show with Lion I Am, presenting the perfect sonic eruption of metal and progressive elements.  Prior to their set, Highwire Daze interviewed the band…

Introduce yourself, tell me what you do in Wrath Of Vesuvius, and what’s the most embarrassing song you have on your IPOD?
Marcus: I’m Marcus, I play guitar – and I don’t have an IPOD – but I guess that Deolinda probably – it’s this Portuguese acoustic band – they’re cool but it’s kind of weird.
Joseph: Probably some Britney Spears song – maybe the whole album I got on there – maybe Paris Hilton too.
Trevor: Trevor, I do vocals, and I don’t have any music on my phone.
Jeremy: My name’s Jeremy – I play guitar – and the most embarrassing thing I have is this rap song I did in High School. I was on the swim team – actually me and the bass player – we did a rap song about the things we wore – they were called jammers – kind of like the bathing suit type deal. We did a rap song about that and that’s terrible – I hate it now and I wish I never did it.
Taylor: My name is Taylor, I play bass. And Jammers – I joined the swim team, learned how to swim in my senior year and we ended up making a rap song about it. I learned how to use Reason real quick and we just put some shit together. It’s pretty funny.

Where are you guys based out of and what is your local music scene like there?
Trevor: We are from San Jose and the music scene is pretty good. It’s more so kind of like bar-ish shows. We haven’t played a lot of venues out there – there’s a couple good ones, but for the most part it’s a good bar scene.
Marcus: There were a lot of venues about 2-3 years ago, but there’s no more.

Is there any story or concept behind the title of the CD Revelation (on Rite of Passage/MediaSkare Records)?
Trevor: For the most part, Revelation just really meaning change –we changed a lot as a band – and we kind of went with that direction. Pretty straightforward I guess. It wasn’t really much stories behind it. It really has a lot to do with real life shit. Not Revelation meaning like we’re a Christian band or anything.

How does this one compare to the previous Wrath Of Vesuvius recordings? You already have an EP and a previous full length out at this point…
Taylor: I’ll say the sounds were a lot of different on the other ones. I would say it was heavier. Also at the same time, we took a better look at the structure of the songs and the lyrics and having a real message to lyrics. That’s why some people thing we’re a Christian band. If you look at some of the lyrics, you’re like, “Damn, that’s depressing as fuck!” or you’d be like “Damn, that’s a hella optimistic way to looking at how shitty life is.” It’s a way different approach – it’s more personal to us now I think. Before, we talked about space and shit like that…
Jeremy: It was kind of typical death metal lyrics – well not necessarily typical. It was more so just like chaos and destruction and stuff like that. But now it’s now of more of personal struggles and experiences and what we take on it and how we’ve changed growing up and going through all of these experiences. That’s the most general message that I think our newest full length presents.

Let’s talk about some of the songs on Revelation. Pick two songs from the album and what inspired the lyrics.
Marcus: There’s a lot of different ones. For Somber Silence – that one’s weird – I remember I stayed up drinking Red Bull and Vodka and I couldn’t go to sleep – so I just wrote a bunch of random ass lyrics. There was this line in it about the stuff that was going around in the city too, at the same time too. It’s not literally about that, but if you pay attention to the details, it’s like what was going on at the time. Regarding Unity, that was about the band – all the struggles that we’d been going through – the years going up to that – breaking up maybe – other stuff like that.

How close are you to writing and recording new material?
Trevor: We actually just started to writing new stuff as of maybe 2-3 weeks ago. I don’t know how many songs we have exactly, but as far as recording it, maybe another year. Hopefully less.
Joseph: This year!

What could one expect from your live show tonight?
Trevor: I’m going to get real fucking weird.
Jeremy: And I’m going to take my pants off. And maybe more if you guys are lucky!
Trevor: Just weird energy. I wouldn’t necessarily say angry – just weird – very strange. We’ve very unorthodox. We just kind of move around crazy with not much direction in our performance. We don’t have any moves per say, we just feel the music and do weird stuff.

If you guys could open for any band either now or from the past, who would it be and why?
Jeremy: I don’t know honestly, just because there’s so many bands that I love and I’m open to many different genres. It’s hard to really pick which one we would fit in with. That’s a hard one for me to answer – I’d have to think about it.
Trevor: I would like to open for Architects UK – that’s the shit!
Joseph: I would have to say Metallica – that would be cool to meet them.
Taylor: I would say Between The Buried And Me – it’s pretty eclectic stuff and we’re pretty eclectic. We’ve kind of like to crowd to be the same or to be open to something weird.
Marcus: Probably Circa Survive – that would be sick – or Deaf Heaven – that would be tight – one of those two. But I agree with what Jeremy said – there’s a lot of other bands I would probably want to open up for.

If your music was a donut, what kind would it be and why?
Trevor: I got this! I made up a donut. There’s this place in Hollywood – it’s called Highland Donuts – and they have a peanut butter donut. And I said, “What if they were to put jelly in it?” So I would have to say a peanut butter and jelly donut, cuz it just mixes very well. And our music mixes very well.

What’s up next for Wrath of Vesuvius after this tour?
Joseph: We have a tour starting March 25th with Fall City Fall.

Any final words of wisdom or messages for people who are reading this now?
Trevor: Start a band! Jam! Play music forever!
Joseph: Support music.
Taylor: Don’t close yourself off to any kind of music ever.
Marcus: Stay tuned for our future stuff.
Jeremy: For the other fellow musicians out there, if you love it as much as I do, just keep doing it. Everybody says it‘s a hard struggling getting up anywhere. But as long as you’re true to it and you keep doing it, it’s possible…

(Interview and Photos by Ken Morton)

Wrath of Vesuvius at Facebook