Inward Eye Look Outward From Winnipeg After Smoking J

Winnipeg's Inward Eye are going to have to face the fact that, as a young brother trio, they're going to find their name spoken in the same breath as '90s teen-pop siblings Hanson.

"I think that's the lamest thing that could possibly be mentioned," front-brother Dave Erickson says, and that's that.

Still, the combination of family and professional life in this format is pretty rare (lame Hanson and possibly Joey Lawrence references aside) since most brothers simply spend their childhood beating the crap out of each other. Dave, Kyle and Anders Erickson began rocking out in their basement almost a decade ago, but it hasn't been all brotherly love.

"There's a lot of fights, for sure," Dave admits.

Drummer Anders quickly agrees, "but we're usually able to get over it pretty fast. None of us hold grudges because we've been used to fighting with each other since we were little kids."

"Yeah, it gives us kind of a licence to be like overly and brutally honest with each other," Dave interjects, "which can be good and can be bad. But we're really not good fighters, so we don't hit each other too hard."

"Plus we're pretty skinny, you know?" Anders deadpans. "I'd be scared to break a wrist in one punch."

The three, only in their late teens and early twenties, recently signed to New York's J Records after label head and music industry legend Clive Davis requested a personal showcase.

"It was the weirdest thing," Dave says. "It was like a last-minute thing, and we rushed to this club, like a really small club, they like put all the lights out and like put candles everywhere, and they just had Clive Davis sitting at a table right in the middle.

"And there was a lit stage, and they're just like, 'OK, play for like 20 minutes and then just walk off.' So it was really formal, really weird."

"We weren't even planning on doing it," Anders picks up. "We were in New York and we were on the way back to the airport, we were getting into our car, and then they kept on phoning us and telling us to turn around and do this.

"And at first we were like, 'Oh, can we really cancel our flights to do just one more showcase?' Because we had just finished doing a whole bunch of showcases, so slowly we finally realized that, yeah, we should do this."

The boys' careers may be moving fast, but they're taking their time to develop their mod-influenced rock material. Dave says Inward Eye have made several trips to their producer's place in California over the past year to jam, write and record demos. The band hope to release some music in the next few months, possibly as an EP.

Meanwhile, you can catch Inward Eye at the Horseshoe at 9 p.m. on March 3 as part of the Chart/CMW showcase.