“He shaves often, while I don’t”, says Dino jokingly as a response to the question of how to differentiate him from Julio, his twin brother and other half of Hong Kong-based rock band, Soler. Jokes aside, UrbanWire speaks to the twins, who are the fastest band in musical history to have their debut concert in the prestigious Hong Kong Coliseum, during their 5-day promotion beginning Jan 20 in Singapore for their latest release, X2.

Nothing but Musicians

The brothers’ Italian and Burmese origins are clearly visible in their exotic looks. Verbal communication is not a problem as they can converse in 7 languages, namely English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French, but even if they couldn’t their charisma would carry them far. Born and raised in Macau, they burst into the music scene in 2005 with their debut album, Double Stereo. They may not have been in the business long, but already they’re sure this is exactly what they want to do. “If we’re not musicians now, we’ll be trying to be musician,” said Julio, the elder brother, showing their passion and enthusiasm for music.

Double Treat

Although X2 is their third studio album, it’s their first with 2 CDs, one in English and the other in Mandarin, meaning 19 songs in 2 languages. SOLER feels that it’s easier and less time-consuming to present both sides of their music to fans this way. Answering the questions in English or Mandarin, Julio said that many of their family and friends loved their English songs after listening to the few English tracks featured in their past albums.

SOLER is not only comfortable with singing in both English and Mandarin, they are also adept at performing in various countries, like Europe, which they visited in the past few years. In fact, they try to learn from each local music scene. Explained Dino in Mandarin, “The songs we write now are more towards the Chinese music scene as we’ve been [in Hong Kong] for a long time, so I think we’ve absorbed quite a lot to contribute to the Chinese style in our music.”

While many bands hanker after the underground or alternative label, SOLER wants to be known as a mainstream band. “Our main objective is to communicate with the audience and only a limited group of people will listen to us if our music was to be non-mainstream,” Dino continued in Mandarin. “Although we are a rock band, we try to present our songs more towards the pop genre. Many people might think that our ‘band sound’ will be categorised as underground but I think we can try to change the mindset.”

X2, a Live Experience

The whole album is recorded to give an experience of a live performance. “The first thing we hope to achieve in this album is to entice the audiences to come and see us perform live,” Dino said. SOLER hopes to collaborate with popular R&B singer Gary Cao and Hong Kong pop star Justin Lo in the near future, hopefully performing with them, in their world tour soon.

X2, All About Communication

“Secondly, we hope that our songs motivate our listeners to communicate more with their family and friends,” said Julio, who values family ties dearly. In this album, SOLER puts the focus on communication and family. They wrote a song “Hey, Ma” for their mother and “Saving Grace” for their father. “I think that nowadays, many people are listening to love songs and seldom do they get to listen to songs about family. I think that there is a need to have more songs on the topic of kinship,” Julio elaborated.

“Dino also wrote a song, “Brothers” for me, telling how he helped me through a dark period of my life,” Julio described in Mandarin.

According to Dino, Julio lost his direction in life a few years ago and stopped contacting his family and friends. “If you have siblings you would know what I mean when there’s sudden lost of someone so close to you. So I decided to write a song to tell him what my thoughts are and how I feel,” Dino said.

Julio pointed out several role models who share their belief that you can strike a balance between work in show business and family: “Chris Martin is a great husband and Sting has 6 kids.”

He added, “I think that no matter how famous you are or if you have to travel for performances; as long as there’s love… you can still have a beautiful family. So I don’t have many worries about it,” He added.

SOLER, Jack of All Trades

Their multi-lingual ability translates into a similarly wide music diet, SOLER listens to almost every genre of music. From radio tunes to Bossa nova, it seems like there’s almost nothing that they don’t listen to as they amaze UrbanWire with the list of singers and musicians that they love listening to.

Although SOLER doesn’t mind working with different genres of music, they intend to keep their music simple. “We tend to go for an almost naïve, kind of music. We want to keep it like that. We like the naivety in our songs, the simple melodies, [which are] closer to folk songs.” explained Dino in English. “We will include our own lives in our songs in a way that our audience can relate to.”

And unlike many other bands, artistic differences don’t seem to bother the two. Julio thinks, “It might be because we have been writing songs since young and we listen to the same genres of music. It’s hard to quarrel like that.”

Singapore, Not Just another Country

To many artistes, Singapore may just be another country that they come to for promotional tours. But to SOLER, it’s more than that. They have several friends and families who live in Singapore and have lots of connections in this small island. “It’s a great place to be in, physically also,” Dino commented.

They’re especially pleased with Singaporean courtesy. “There’re rude people everywhere… but the percentage seems to be a lot lower [here],” Dino said.

If you’re a fan of SOLER, you’ve got to loosen up as the duo thinks that their fans are too shy. They revealed that they always chat with their fans at events, starting with greetings like ‘Hello, how are you’. But they’re expecting more than that in the future. “I can’t wait to tease Singapore fans,” Julio said. That’s something they hope to achieve with their fans – building real relationships.

X2, A New Start

Previously involved in a contract dispute, SOLER is now back on track with a local company, Funkie Monkies (FM), as the first overseas artiste that FM have signed. “They are a singer-songwriter based company and we are singer-songwriters,” Dino said.

SOLER was full of praise for their new partner, saying “[They are] a company that understands [our] mindset and what it means to be a musician today.” SOLER promised that we’ll be seeing more of them in Singapore in the near future.

Interested to know more about the charming brothers? Check out SOLER’s official blog or visit them at their MySpace.