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Aug 30th
Home arrow Reviews arrow Band Interviews arrow Interview w/ Zak Vargas of Elysia
Interview w/ Zak Vargas of Elysia Print E-mail
Written by Art Michalski   
Thursday, 05 June 2008
ImageSacramento based Elysia is going to be one busy band this summer. They will be out on road all summer as they prepares to release their new album, Lion Of Judas. The band will headline the “Ferret Young Guns” throughout June and then head on the road with hardcore growing juggernauts Full Blown Chaos later in the summer. As lead singer Zak Vargas was enjoying some downtime before the tour started, yours truly had to go and bother him. Here is what we learned about Elysia:

About recording part of their album in the former witch hunting town of Salem, MA: “I think the album planned on sounding a lot like it did before going to Salem. We spent a week during this past winter there recording, and the cold and snow helped the music. But there were already depressing and dark elements to the record, so it was just kind of concidential how it came out.”

On the band’s shift in influences: “I used a lot of older metalcore parts that came from bands like Coalesce and early Converge records. But there are more modern influences in there as well.”


On the band’s updated lineup: “It’s felt pretty good so far with the lineup, we have probably toured the most with this new lineup. I think it’s the tightest group that has ever played in this band. Our new bass player used to play in a band with our drummer, and when we lost our last bass player, the drummer wanted to play in a band with him again”.


On issues with faith on the new record: “A lot of our older material attacked more social issues. The new record deals more with personal issues with myself. The song “Lion of Judas” deals with my loss or questioning my faith in things and its something that I haven’t really tackled in the past.”


On silencing early critics of their music: “We’ve definitely silenced those people who thought our lyrics seemed misogynist. For the new record, we wrote two songs about the issues with sexism. We are writing songs about how we really feel and we feel that the early stuff is completely irrelevant now. Things I wrote years ago do not share the same beliefs I have now.”


Elysia will be headlining the “Ferret Young Guns” tour, coming to the Magic Stick on Monday, June 16th. Tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com. Additional dates can be found at www.myspace.com/elysia.

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