Federal Lights

When Winnipegger Jean-Guy Roy founded Federal Lights back in 2010, it was a solo basement recording project — the product of stolen early mornings spent experimenting on a bare-bones setup in a cold storage room.

Federal Lights provided a bridge back into making music for Roy, whose previous band, Britpop-influenced outfit The Morning After, disbanded in 2008. Still, Roy wasn't interested in being a guy-with-a-guitar, nor was he fulfilled by recording lo-fi creative exercises for himself. The songs he was writing — earworm indie-rock anthems with big choruses and even bigger guitars — were meant to be heard live.

Like all good music destined to be discovered, it wasn't long before those soaring choruses found their way onto Winnipeg stages. Roy enlisted the talents of bassist Rob Mitchell (The Attics), drummer David Pankratz (Quinzy) and his wife, keyboardist/vocalist Jodi Roy, and, by mid 2011, Roy found himself fronting one of Winnipeg's most buzzed-about live bands.

In fall of 2011, Federal Lights recorded some songs with noted engineer Cam Loeppky (Weakerthans, Greg MacPherson, Cannon Bros.) at his Prairie Recording Co. The result is Carbon — a debut EP that captures both the intensity of Federal Lights' live show as well as the raw grit of Roy's early basement recordings.

In February of 2012, Carbon was released and met with immediate praise by local and national press. CBC hailed it as -

"a slew of sparkling sonic accents that come together to form an incandescent experience that's both rousing and soothing all at once"

And John Sakamoto of the Toronto Star likened Roy's songwriting to that of Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor calling it -

"quietly electric, emotionally unguarded, and so thick with regret, you’d need a hoe to cut through it."

As a result the band was able to garner performances at Canadian Music Week in Toronto, score a Canadian tour with fellow Winnipeggers, Imaginary Cities and Rah Rah, and also play a handful of summer festivals including Trout Forest Festival, Harvest Moon Festival and the Brandon Folk Festival where they were named by the CBC as one of the top five acts to see.

Federal Lights has recently returned home from their first western canadian tour and now looks forward to the remainder of 2012 which will see them perform at Breakout West Festival in September and also at Toronto's Indie Week in October. From there the band will return to the studio to complete its debut full length record which should drop in the summer of 2013.