Mark Morton at the Heavy Metal Examiner recently spoke with POWERGLOVE bassist Nick Avila. The interview was conducted during a stop on the band's current North American tour supporting SONATA ARCTICA. An excerpt is available below.

Q: You guys have been around for five or six years now, and you are just now starting to make a name for yourselves in the national circuit. What took so long getting things off the ground?

Avila: "It was actually hard to get out name out there, being an instrumental band that played video game songs. We had to do a lot of trial and error. We started out in the video game theming world, where the only shows we could get were video game conventions or shows with other video game bands. We ultimately didn’t play a lot of shows, because we wanted to build a fan base first. The first couple years of the band was just recording and working on putting a solid lineup together. When we initially began recording, we were all actually in a melodic death metal band we were trying to 'make it' with, and we started doing Powerglove as a joke. We recorded the Mega Man theme as a metal song and laughed about it. Then we posted it online, and people started to really dig it.

In 2005, we recorded the first EP, Total Pwnage, and our fan base increased. We did a lot of hardcore online promotion and landed our first tour with PSYCHOSTICK by complete chance. One of the bands that was supposed to be on the tour dropped off, and we got on it at the last minute. And during that time, our guitarist Chris Marchiel emailed Herman Li from DRAGONFORCE. He saw that we were on tour and invited us to open a show for them in Portland. The show went amazingly well, and then they invited us to tour with them. And it wasn’t until then that we started to get a lot more attention, a lot more press, and label interest. It was a real chain reaction, and everything really started coming together. For me, it really doesn’t seem like that much time at all, because there are tons of bands out there that take 10-15 years before people start paying attention to them. I think we’ve been very lucky so far."

Q: I find it interesting that it still took that long, because DragonForce, which is a huge band, is in essence playing the same kind of music that you are, but they have vocals.

Avila: "[Laughs] Yeah, we are all fans of DragonForce, but most of our actual influences come from Japanese pop-metal bands. And that’s actually where we got the ideas for the costumes because in Japan, the stage shows are really overly-dramatic. There’s a style over there called Visual Kei that we like a lot; it’s a lot like glam but taken a step further – they dress in big, poofy, post-Renaissance costumes, which make for a very bizarre and goofy live show. Bands like VERSAILLES, MALICE MIZER, and X JAPAN were all big influences on Powerglove. But we do get the DragonForce comparison a lot."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

Remaining dates on the tour are as follows:

April

16 - Starlite Room - Edmonton, AB
18 - The Venue - Vancouver, BC
19 - El Corazon - Seattle, WA
20 - Peter’s Room - Portland, OR
23 - The Galaxy Theatre - Santa Ana, CA
24 - House of Blues - Hollywood, CA
25 - U.B’s Bar - Mesa, AZ
27 - Emo’s - Austin, TX
28 - Meridian - Houston, TX
29 - The Marquee - Tulsa, OK
30 - The Masquerade - Atlanta, GA

May

1 - Volume 11 - Raleigh, NC
2 - Jaxx Nightclub - W. Springfield, VA