Alberta pop-rock machine Go For The Eyes has been making big sounds for almost three years, but its latest EP, the six-song Six Through Twelve (out at the end of this month), is the first of three recordings the band is truly proud of.

“Yeah, we’re disowning one of them,” vocalist/guitarist Jeff Turner says over the phone from the band’s Calgary jam space. “That first record, man, it was terrible. I wouldn’t have changed a thing, though. We were inexperienced, right?”

The band’s output was also helped along by the fact that its former bassist had a home studio, making it infinitely easier to pump out a product.

“We kind of just shit out a couple albums,” adds vocalist/keyboardist Elise Roller. “I think we were just really eager to get music out there and so eager that we didn’t put the kind of work into the music that we should have. It wasn’t really the kind of quality that’s going to take us where we want to go.”

Where the band is going right now is to Canadian Music Week in Toronto, the annual industry event that gets the word out for serious bands.

Along the way, the four-piece, which also includes bassist Scott Perrin and drummer Nathan Raboud, will be hitting up a few other cities, including the Double Decker in Brandon on March 15 and the Cavern in Winnipeg on March 16.

Though the band has toured Canada twice, this is its first jaunt in a while.

“I guess in the last year we didn’t really go anywhere since we were just in our basement trying to come up with the best music we could,” Roller says. “We’re trying to build things regionally and hit as many festivals as we can.”

The band’s crisp, big sound is all over the tracks on Six Through Twelve, a record that was recorded in just four (long) days, but prepped for six months.

“We just put our big boy underwear on and decided that we were going to be better,” Roller says. “Any musician can write a song, but we work really, really hard at writing amazing songs. We spend upwards of 10 days on one song just trying to make it perfect. We actually had about 15 songs that we could’ve recorded, but we chose the cream of the crop.”

Accompanying many of the sounds that Go For The Eyes create are a series of DIY music videos, from stripped-down covers to the slick-as-you-can-get-for-free stop-motion insanity of Leave Me With Today, the band is keen to utilize the visual aspect of getting the word out.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call us a ‘video band,’ but I think the thing we try to do with our music is make the best possible music that we can,” Turner says.

“When you see an OK Go video, you’re absolutely blown away. If we’re going to make a video, we’re going to make sure that people are entertained. You have three or four minutes to show people not only something interesting but something that catches your ear and your eye at the same time.

“No matter what we try to do, whether it’s an album or tour or whatever, we try to do something that’s maybe not going to make us different from every other band ever, but something that’s going to make us different from ourselves.”

Published in Volume 67, Number 23 of The Uniter (March 14, 2013)