“Lock It Up” Track List:

1. Lock It Up
2. City Lights
3. Comfort
4. Hold On

White Lightning is about to strike in cyberspace. On July 7, the St. Albert, Alta. rock band’s EP “Lock It Up” will be available through CD Baby, which in turn gets distributed though most reputable digital distribution sites.

The band’s first EP “Hold On” was also released through CD Baby in August 2008, so what’s the big difference this time? “Hold On” was available in hard copy. “Lock It Up” is only going to be sold online. At least for now.

“It’s mostly for cost, honestly,” admits Enoch Rottier, a graduate of Grant MacEwan College’s three-year music program and the man behind the percussion for the experimental trio.

“We still have a few CDs from the last year’s EP that we still sell at shows, and once we get rid of those we might start selling these.

The key word here is “might.”

“We have a lot of fans that are probably under 30 that are a lot more accessible just through the Internet,” he explains. “But there are definitely people you just meet, and a lot of our friends will come to our shows, and they’re like, ‘Can we get that right now off you?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, can’t really do that, so…’ That’s probably one of the biggest disadvantages, but we did more or less focus this album on being our big demo album and a big focus for us for this was definitely to try and get picked up by a record label.”

The trio, rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Steve Bosch and bassist Jimmy Rushton – who traded in his own guitar for a bass in order to join the band – funded the EP after winning Futures Fest battle of the bands in spring 2008.

“With that we got a few thousand bucks towards recording, so in September we sat down and chose our four best songs. We recorded at the beginning of November and then it was just that whole process of working with the producer,” Rottier says.

The band recorded at Visionary Studios in St. Albert, and was produced by Ontario-based Terry Lesperance.

“Our bass player grew up in Ontario and he had a connection with Terry. He had done some recording sessions with him and knew Terry had some sweet connections. Terry had produced a really early Seether album, and then last fall he was working with Hall and Oates, so he does many different things. But we pretty much co-produced, because we had figured out exactly what we wanted. He primarily mixed it, but he definitely added and tweaked a lot of things and gave it a much fuller sound.”

How did the recording of this CD differ from your first, “Hold On?”

We really just wanted something to sell at shows, so we found a really good room and did everything live off the floor. And it was good. It was really low-cost and a good experience. I’m glad we recorded before we actually went in for this last one, because the last one was – I’ve recorded a lot of stuff myself, but the band really hasn’t.

Some of the songs on the new release were on that original EP, right?

Yeah, but we re-did them. We actually redid three of the four songs on there. One of them was just an acoustic song that our lead singer had done with his girlfriend singing backups. It was a pretty cool track, but we wanted to record as a full band, we added keys for the new songs and a bunch of other things. But that was another reason why we didn’t necessarily release it on a hard copy too, because people already had three of those songs, even though these are way better quality.

New and improved and better produced?

Totally.

How else have you been using the Internet highway to promote yourselves?

We’re hoping to do the Warped Tour battle of the bands, so we’ve been plugging that to our fans to go vote all the time. We use Sonic Bids so we can have a press kit. Facebook is really accessible for a lot of people. I think MySpace, at least in my mind, gets used a lot by bands, but I don’t think many people are following it unless they’re huge into following music.

So if someone was looking you up, would they find your band, or the Def Leppard song of the same name?

I didn’t even know – the bass player was like, “White Lightning, that’s our band’s name!” And we voted on it and we were like, “Nope, we’re not going to do that.” And then we just decided, “Let’s just use that.” There are a lot of different White Lightning bands though, and I think it’s also a moonshine from South Africa too.

And there was a psychedelic stoner rock band from the ’60s.

We’re hoping we don’t have to change our name because of that [laughs].

So who would you say are the band’s main influences?

We’ve got a lot of influences; in fact, each guy pretty much has his own thing. In some ways, I could listen to Pat Metheny or Damien Rice and really chilled out stuff, so I’ve got the jazz thing going on sometimes, but I like some really hard stuff too. But I’d say our biggest influences are the Foo Fighters , Underoath and Finger Eleven. We have a lot of influence from the older heavy metal and hard rock bands, like Led Zeppelin and Sabbath, and even Pink Floyd. It’s neat having a lot of different influences, because we’re not really trying to just be one genre.

What do you think defines White Lightning’s sound the most?

We’re a power rock trio. I mean, we all do the vocals together, three-part harmonies, on 90 per cent of our songs, which is really sweet. It’s something we realized we could do and I’d never sung in other bands as a drummer, but I definitely love doing that. And as a three piece, you almost have to overcompensate sometimes compared to a four or five-piece, but we really enjoy a lot of that too. There’s a lot of power dancy rock too, but there’s definitely some heavy stuff in the mix as well.

Got any travel plans for promoting the reworked tunes?

We’d like to travel a little bit more and we’re going to do an Ontario tour probably in the fall some time because our bass player has a bunch of connections out there.