Anime Fits Metal Like a Powerglove

Since 2005, Powerglove has been making the headbanging-est power metal covers of your favorite songs from video games and Saturday-morning cartoons. They've performed around the world with metal legends, at conventions, and more. One of the members of ANN's editorial team was at a recent Boston show where Powerglove was opening for the legendary Sonata Arctica, and they couldn't help but notice that Powerglove announced to the audience that their next album was going to be anime songs—and then, of course, they played the iconic English language opening to Sailor Moon. To celebrate and learn more, ANN sat down with all three members of Powerglove to talk all things metal, anime, and this upcoming album.

So, for our readers who might not be familiar with you, who are you?

Bassil Silver: We are Powerglove. We are a band that plays metal covers of nerd culture songs, video game songs, Saturday-morning cartoons, and, with this new record coming up, anime songs as well.

Yes! I wanted to ask about the new record! So, tell me all about it. What led to the decision to make an album with anime songs?

Bassil Silver: We actually do have one anime song from a long time ago that we covered—the Pokémon theme with Tony [Kakko] from Sonata Arctica, and that one sort of popped off online, and I think we've played it every single show that we've played since releasing it. We actually recently played Animenia out in the United Arab Emirates. So on our 400-hour plane ride back to the States, we were all jazzed up about all these different anime. We just saw all these cool, giant Attack on Titan statues and everything, and heard all these different bands that—you know, FLOW was there and a bunch of different bands who play a lot of these anime songs that are the actual theme songs and everything. So, we're all stoked about anime themes and started throwing out ideas, and it just started—momentum started moving forward, and it just became a thing, and we went for it.

What are y'all's favorite anime?

Gabriel Guardian: You've got to hear it! You're gonna have to listen to it!

Oh, are they going to be in the album? I don't suppose we can ask for a hint at one or two of them?

Gabriel Guardian: A hint is that the one that we just finished playing every night on tour, obviously, we did Sailor Moon. That was a super fun one that will definitely be on the record.

You mentioned that part of the inspiration for this album came from performing at a convention. Is performing at anime conventions something on your radar with this upcoming album?

Bassil Silver: Absolutely. We've been doing them for a number of years. All the different conventions like video game conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, and things. And a lot of them just tend to be kind of nerd culture cons in general that aren't necessarily specific, but some of them are.

One of the fun things that we've always liked about anime conventions, specifically, is that pretty much everyone tends to be cosplaying. It's like the highest rate of cosplay anywhere, where it almost feels weird to be in street clothes. You're like, "Ah, like this person in jeans." So that's super fun and just immersing in that culture.

We've been doing them for years. Of course, when releasing an anime record, we're going to probably target them a bit more, and hopefully it'll garner some interest among that scene a bit. They're super fun to play, the crowds are always enthusiastic, and they know all the songs. So, we love doing them.

You mentioned a lot of Saturday morning cartoons and all that. Can we expect maybe some nostalgic, Toonami-era tracks on the new album?

Gabriel Guardian: There'll definitely be some nostalgic stuff—stuff that came out, what, 10, 20 years ago or something? Oh geez, it even hurts to say that out loud. Time flies so fast.

Are there any songs from newer anime that are going to be on there as well?

Alex Berkson: It's a mix of both. We do a couple that are pretty old. We do some kind of in the middle, and some newer ones. So we got the whole spectrum.

What has been each of your favorite parts of recording an anime album?

Gabriel Guardian: For me personally, it's just seeing how, because to do these metal covers, you have to dissect something that you didn't write. And to do anime music as opposed to video game music or something, it's so different for me. It's so refreshing. It's like, whoa! It's been fun to alter these super foreign melodies, too.

Bassil Silver: One thing that's fun about the anime songs in particular, compared to video games, a lot of them tend to be vocals. Both Alex and Gabriel are vocalists, so they've been having a lot of fun with big vocal harmonies and things like that. And also, the writing style tends to be very—a lot of it comes from Japanese culture, of course, which tends to be very intense and fast and exciting in sound. So, except for Studio Ghibli and the Miyazaki films, they tend to be a little more emotional. So the nice thing about that is that it's lent itself to kind of a variety of sounds. We have songs on the record that sound like they're from completely different universes, which is actually really fun to have that variety as opposed to just kind of more of a single sound throughout.

Alex Berkson: Some of that Bassil touched on, doing the vocals for some of that was definitely challenging. Recording one of them was like—we were doing translations into English, and it was something we had never done. And then how fast they sing is very impressive. I have a new respect for that. It's insanely fast compared to any other European or American power metal that I've heard. It was a cool skill to learn. The approach to the anime stuff is a little different from the video game stuff because they're more, I guess, full songs. So there's more we can focus on, more on the arrangement, and a little bit less on how we change out the melodies and do all this different stuff to them. It was different than just doing straight video game stuff.

You mentioned at one point the translation. How did you go about translations in these songs? Did you hire a translator? Are any of you translators yourselves? Did you use the officially available translations? Can you walk me through how you balanced that?

Bassil Silver: It's a whole process. A lot of them, there's not necessarily an official translation. Sometimes when there is, then great, easy, we just use that. If there isn't an official English version and there's just a bunch of different versions that people have done, then we'll do a combination of just direct translation on the internet. Just grab the lyrics and throw them into a translator, which obviously can get you some hit or miss results. And then comparing that to all the different versions. Some of them are so different. We're working on one song that was pretty long, and we're looking at all of these different versions. It's almost like they're kind of touching on the same concept, and we were pretty much almost writing our own set of lyrics that just kind of follow the same concepts or get the same kind of message across. But it's not word-for-word because the languages are so different.

We also have friends who grew up in Japan who've been helping us to ensure that they work or don't sound stupid. They can help with translations. It can also help to ensure that when we're—if we're doing certain songs that are translated into English and then ones that we sing in Japanese, ensure that we sound correct and aren't saying something stupid or don't sound ridiculous.

Gabriel Guardian: The hardest part, I would say, about the translation that you don't think about until you're in the moment and you're in the trenches. You can directly translate it, no problem, but then it doesn't rhyme, or it doesn't flow. Sometimes, it's too many syllables now to fit in that same melody that they sang, or too few syllables. It's one thing to translate it, but another thing is to translate it musically and make it fit within the context of a song. It was a fun challenge, but somehow we three Americans pulled it off with the help of our friends.

Did I hear you correctly—there are going to be songs where y'all are going to be singing in Japanese?

Gabriel Guardian: Oh yeah!

Bassil Silver: Trying to sprinkle some hints in here and there!

Oh, wow! That's exciting! What's the biggest challenge about singing in Japanese?

Alex Berkson: Everything! Not sounding like an idiot! You don't know if you sound like an idiot, right? I might be like, "Oh, it sounds fine to me. Sounds the same." But I'm sure that to a native person, they'll probably hear it very differently. Sometimes that can sound cool, right? Like accents, but sometimes it can sound a little sus.

Gabriel Guardian: There's also the test—you pass it to your homie that speaks fluent Japanese, like, “Can you understand what I'm singing here? Okay, cool. Good to go.”

Alex Berkson: The challenging thing there, too, is—and this can be, this is with English words, you don't necessarily pronounce the English word the way you would sing it. Like, you sing the English word differently. I'm sure it applies to singing in Japanese as well. So you can't just look up the words and pronounce them like they would speak them, because that doesn't make sense either. Luckily, we can reference the original song, but sometimes those mixes aren't good. It's kind of tough to hear what they're saying, or maybe they said it a little funny. So, it's definitely challenging.

Have there been any other particular challenges or hurdles that y'all have had to overcome working on this album?

Gabriel Guardian: I would say it's not necessarily a new challenge, but just the fact that we live in three different cities, as opposed to traditional band hopping in a studio together. That's always fun. We make it happen, but that's a big challenge in every album: being able to pull it off over—thank god we have the internet.

Bassil Silver: Also, just going on tour mid-album cycle. We did two short tours during this one and a festival in between. Which always just derails it a bit, that pretty much pushed it back a month, maybe almost even a month and a half because it's just—we'll always go into a tour with the intention of like, “Oh, I'll bring a setup and we'll get all this stuff done on the tour!” and it's just impossible. It just never happens. So, you know that always pushes it back, which can be a bummer because then if a tour opportunity comes up, you have to weigh it. It's like, “This is a great opportunity! Should we do this? But it's going to push the album back by this amount!” So, it's always a conversation we're having about when they're worth it, or how much it's going to push it back, and things like that. So, that can be a challenge as well.

Have you been performing songs from this album at any of these tours, any of these shows? I know you did the Sailor Moon theme when you opened for Sonata Arctica [in Boston]. Have you been performing that at other shows, as well, or any others?

Bassil Silver: Yeah, we did it at a convention that we played in between the two tours, and then we did Sailor Moon as well on the tour we just did with Nekrogoblikon a few weeks ago.

Do you see the weebs turning up in the audience?

Bassil Silver: For sure. It's definitely getting people excited because it's so different. And I've noticed a lot more women getting excited about it, too. It's like, this is one for the ladies, which is cool because our world is so male-dominated that it's nice to kind of—”In the Dark of the Night,” I think, also had a bit of that effect, too. We'd hear a lot more women cheering in the crowd when we'd play that, but I think it's happening even more so with Sailor Moon.

Gabriel Guardian: I think it's cool to see people come to the merch table and be like, "Here, I want to buy the one that has Sailor Moon on it!" It's like, "It's not out yet!" “All right, I want to buy it!” “You didn't hear what we just said! It's not here!” But it's cool. People have been digging it at the live shows.

Speaking of, can I ask the big question? When will it be out?

Bassil Silver: We don't have a specific date for it. I guess we can narrow it to sometime next year(2026). I know that's a pretty wide area, but we can confidently say that. It'll be ready on February 31st. We'll say that.

What are you most excited to see come out of this album? We were just talking about how you see more women getting turned up for Sailor Moon at your shows. And as this album gets closer to finishing up, and you start performing more and more of these songs, what are some of the things you're hoping to see at live shows in response to these new songs?

Bassil Silver: I would love to see the anime conventions—a lot more people in cosplay. It would be really cool, it's so deeply ingrained in that culture. It's also just nice to reach a new set of people, a new audience of people who are excited about a different subset of our kind of nerd culture world. So it's always exciting to see different people come out and come out for different reasons. I think it'll be really cool. I really hope to see a lot more people coming out in cosplay to the show. That always makes it so much fun as well.

What do y'all think would be the coolest cosplay to see at a Powerglove show?

Bassil Silver: Really big Costumes that are really overblown and well done. I mean, the classic is just seeing a Cloud with a giant buster sword. At MAGFest, we had four Tetris blocks in the mosh pit, but they're huge, like 10-foot-tall massive Tetris things. Anything that people kind of go really all in. That's one cool thing about a lot of the anime characters, because they're more human-esque, people can look exactly like the character, which is really cool.

Alex Berkson: Anything that people put the time into. It doesn't matter to me if it's a video game, anime, or anything if they put the time into it. It's also cool when I see a collection. Like if somebody did the Team Fortress cast or whatever, like Stranger Things. Doesn't really matter. But it's cool to see the multi-person cosplay, like the complete set, so to speak.

Gabriel Guardian: My thoughts are the same. It's like seeing a musician outside of your genre. You just have so much respect, like, “Dude, I don't know anything about that, but I could tell you took a lot of time to develop this.” We see pretty impressive stuff at some of the shows. We definitely admire that.

Do any of you go to conventions even when you're not performing?

Gabriel Guardian: Yes, but typically we're performing at most of them. Just because we have such busy lives outside of the conventions. But we get a lot of conventions every year. We get around the country. It's funny that we live in different cities, but I feel like I see these dudes all the time at conventions.

What is y'all's favorite part of performing specifically at conventions as opposed to—I do not doubt in my mind that opening for Sonata Arctica, for example, was super cool. But what do you think sets performing at conventions apart from shows like those?

Bassil Silver: Oh, it's such a different experience. A tour versus a fly-in gig is a very different vibe, a different feeling. The crowds tend to be super enthusiastic, and they all know all the songs, which is really nice. I mean, at a lot of these shows, they tend to anyway, just because there's so much crossover with metal and nerd culture. But at the conventions, this is what people live and breathe and love.

Plus, there's just a general sense of enthusiasm for them anyway because we have so many people who were stuffed in lockers and made fun of for enjoying this kind of thing their whole childhoods. Now, we're at a place where everyone loves these games and these shows and everything. So, instead of feeling like an outcast for the things that you like, it's celebrated! It's a place where everyone likes them, and you can feel cool for it, which is just a really cool environment to be in when it's like that.

Do any of you have any favorite anime songs in general that you really like?

Alex Berkson: All the songs that we're doing!

Bassil Silver: The vast majority of our decision-making is based on songs that we think are awesome. So it's kind of how we decide on the checklist. We're like, "Oh, this song is sick!”

Gabriel Guardian: What I think was fun is that all three of us have such an open-mindedness that on this record, we have songs that are just like, full death metal in your face, just metal, and then we have other moments where it's almost like a turn into a piano ballad kind of thing. So I think it's cool that we've been able to find a bunch of different varieties of sounds of anime, that it's not necessarily anime that is metal, and then we covered it in metal. We found stuff that's like—I can't wait for people to hear the original and like A-B it and go, “How the hell did this come out of that?” That's going to be a lot of fun and twisted around.

Usually, I think the Powerglove sound is more power metal, specifically. Am I understanding right that this album is also going into some death metal areas, or other different kinds of metal as well?

Alex Berkson: I still think power metal is at its roots from what we've done so far, listening to it. It's power metal with other stuff featured at times, and not every song sounds like complete power metal. Influences from jazz and all sorts of stuff.

Bassil Silver: We've always hit different subgenres of metal depending on the song itself. Power metal's kind of been our bread and butter because it's so triumphant and exciting. But sometimes, the way the song is originally written, it can lend itself to different subgenres. A lot of the Nobuo Uematsu tracks from Final Fantasy tend to be very symphonic metal type, and have that maybe even Dimmu Borgir vibe to them. Whereas, Mega Man and tracks like that kind of just sound very power metal at their core. A lot of the time, the song will pull itself into a certain direction. And I would say the same is true here.

Are there any particular songs in the album where you think the transformation is really extreme?

[Everyone starts smiling ominously]

Gabriel Guardian: I think one or two that stand out off the top of my head that are like, “That's pretty different.”

The fact that y'all immediately started smiling has me so curious what this will sound like. I am so excited to hear.

Gabriel Guardian: I think even just based on singing the translated part, like an American band singing in Japanese and then also singing Japanese songs in English. That part alone will raise some eyebrows of like, “Huh, that's another way of putting it,” you know? Definitely can't wait to hear everyone's reactions.

Is there anything else you can tell me about the album?

Gabriel Guardian: We're definitely going to be playing some of these tunes live. So we're pretty stoked, too. I can't wait for it to come out so that we can take it on the road and stuff. Expect us to play some of these tunes after the record comes out.

And my last question, do you have any messages for your fans?

Bassil Silver: Stay nerdy.

Gabriel Guardian: Just a big thanks for constantly supporting and being there for us after all these years. It's so awesome to see a lot of people who have told us stories that they saw us back in 2000-whatever. That continuous support is priceless. And just a big shout-out and thanks to everyone who's been listening to Powerglove all these years.

Alex Berkson: Thank you for the support. For us, it's been tough. For me personally, it's been tough because there was probably like eight years where it was really hard to do music as, you know, doing a job full-time and everything, and it was really challenging. We definitely appreciate fans that did stick through.