September 20, 2011

New Feature: Band of The Month - The Garlics


Meet The Garlics, a pop-punk rock band from Quebec with more than 1 million plays on Jango -  They are first out in a series of bands interviewed in our new feature called "Band of the Month". The idea is to give you guys a closer look on how other bands do it and how they've managed to become success stories on Jango.

The Garlics have been on Jango since 2009 and now have more than 20,000 fans. They are currently working on their second album and here is their interview - enjoy!

Describe The Garlics' sound in one sentence?  
The Garlics's sound is unique, meaningful and energetic.

When were The Garlics formed and where?  
We have been playing music since a very young age. May started to write songs when she was 4. She was inviting everyone in family reunion to listen to her new songs and plays. She composed a song in 5th Grade for the 6th Grade who were graduating from Primary School and everyone but literally everyone were crying – on videos from that time you see a tissue box going from one person to the next. In High School, everyone knew who May was. She was participating in sports activities, music activities, organizing charity events, and acting as co-president for the student association. She has a Black Belt in Karate (Kyokushinkaï), Played elite soccer and Volleyball.

Olivier comes from a family of guitarists. His dad and his uncle were all playing guitar. At a very young age, Olivier was playing guitar day after day after day, while taking courses. In High School, he participated along with May, in both the School Harmony and Blues Band. Olivier played guitar, May played flute. On several occasions, Olivier also played in high school talent shows and ended up representing the High School with his band to a Provincial contest. Throughout his teenage years, Olivier worked on finding his sound, not just working on the performance, but mostly working on the originality of his playing and the melody that could create.

Jean-Frédéric became a multi-instrumentalist young musician at a very early age. Influenced by his talented brother who was also playing drums, JF did learn to play drums but also learned to play trumpet, violin, guitar and more percussion instruments always looking for new combinations.

Thus in January 2009 while in High School, Olivier and Will (former member) who were part of The Garlics at the time, recruited May and JF to be part of the band. They had submitted the band for a battle of the bands contest in Montreal a year before. After only 4 weeks of rehearsing they won 2nd place over more than 60 bands pre-selected.  

Name three people who have influenced your music, and tell us why? Living or dead.  
Hayley Williams (Paramore) is one of the major influence we have because we feel she is one the best female rock vocalist of our time. The Rev (Avenged Sevenfold) is an icon for Jeff. He started to drum playing all the songs from him. Finally, it is difficult for us to name bands because we love a lot of different kind of music from Pop rock to more Progressive.

How do you connect with fans and get them involved in your music?  
We answer back to every fan who write to us, we try to get them to participate in every way they can. We also take a lot of time to talk with our fans at the end of our shows and give a lot of free EP's, CD's and t-shirts. We naturally use Jango as a vehicle to expose our material to new audiences.

What do you like the most about Jango Airplay? 
We can easily connect with all our fans by sending emails with updates. Our fans can leave comments on our page and it's a great way to communicate with them on many levels : what they like and don’t, share ideas with them, get their feedback and we especially love the stats and who our fans also likes. We have more than 20 000 fans on this site... Everything's good on Jango! Everytime we put up plays in Jango, we see an increase in traffic on our official website and consequently in our sales on Numusix.com and iTunes.

Is there any recent project you'd like to share with us? Tell us about it.  
We're working with a new producer (John Nathaniel) and just released our new music video "Burning Bridges" and single "Bottom of the Sea". Two more songs will be added by September 19th to Jango and that will likely be all released on a new EP. We plan to have a second album ready by March 2012.

 - The Garlics latest video "Burning Bridges"


Are you guys playing live and do you have any shows coming up soon?  
We do play live and we love it. We have the chance to be invited by a lot of bands to play in the best places/festivals in Quebec. We are looking to expand our market in Spring 2012 after completing our second album. We'll keep you updated on Jango!

Want to hear more from The Garlics? Check them out on the links below


http://www.youtube.com/thegarlicsofficial


Many thanks to The Garlics for supporting Airplay and letting us interview them. And of course thanks to all of you for being part of Jango Airplay - next month we'll be back with another band interview.


/The Jango Airplay Team