Visqueen Record Release Party

Fri Feb 14, Easy Street Records (West Seattle), 7 pm, free.

w/No-No's, Ms. Led, Paxil Rose

Fri Feb 28, Vera Project, $7 ($6 w/club card).

HOW do you write about a popular local band that has just three members when one member is a close friend and another is someone you've worked with for years at The Stranger? Well, I thought I'd start out by asking Visqueen about their hopes and dreams.

As Seattle steadily percolates with a constant brew of new music, it's easy to get caught up in the details of who plays what and who's going where, but then there are the further-reaching details.

Like I know that Visqueen bassist Kim Warnick longs for her future to be lived out on a houseboat, but longing is different from hope. Longing is wanting something you may or may not have a chance of attaining, while a hope is something you wish for that you usually, with determination, get. Both native residents of Washington State, Warnick and drummer Ben Hooker have similar hopes, a hope shared by lots of people who've lived their entire lives in Seattle--or in Hooker's case, across the Sound in Bremerton: to never live in Burien or Tukwila.

For singer and songwriter Rachel Flotard, who hails from New Jersey, the hope part is always somewhere near her reach, and her arm is long enough to make sure Visqueen's potential is fulfilled. "I hope people like our record as much as we do," she answers. That hope should soon be realized as King Me, the band's self-released debut, comes out this week. First single, "Vaxxine," is already in regular rotation on KEXP, and KNDD not only added the song to its daily play list, but also invited Visqueen to perform their kick-ass power pop at a free, all-ages half-time show with the Donnas during last month's Super Bowl.

As an observer, that event (held at the Showbox) was a sight to behold simply because the audience, which included kids barely into their double digits, was noticeably falling (if it hadn't already fallen) in love with Visqueen. From the other side, the band saw the same thing. Says Flotard, "I actually saw the kids in the audience go from just watching to jumping around and singing. It was like this huge smile spreading."

From the get-go, Warnick, who sang in the Fastbacks for 23 years, was amazed at Flotard's ability to write artfully crafted power pop songs despite knowing next to nothing about the bands to whom her catchy tunes most resemble. I was getting astonished reports from Warnick, who claimed that each practice revealed a new Kinks song, a new Flop. "In the beginning, Kim would give me CDs to listen to, and tell me I'm going to love this or that because I wrote a song that sounds similar to it," explains Flotard, "and I had no idea who these bands were." "So you're a savant," I tell her, knowing by doing so Flotard will respond in the sharp-witted manner that is another one of her charms: "I like to think of myself as the Rainman of Pine Street," she answers proudly.

After we all stop laughing, she demurely attempts to provide a more serious explanation for her seemingly historically informed pop knowledge. "Sometimes it's embarrassing, because whenever I'm asked about musical history, and it doesn't have anything to do with Katrina and the Waves or something like that, I'm pretty clueless. It's just melody stuff, the kind that transcends every pop band." Warnick opines, "I think there truly are people who don't read Mojo or don't know trivia who can just pull things out of the air, and she's one of those rare people." Flotard again responds demurely, "It's not like I'm writing super-difficult stuff. You start with a guitar part, and for me it's this really beefy, hard guitar sound that I gravitate to most, and the singing just kind of went along with it."

As far as lyricists go, Flotard is a mystery even to her bandmates. I ask about "Zirconium Gun," and Hooker admits that the first thing he did when he got a copy of King Me was read the lyrics. "I had no idea what our lyrics were, and it's great to finally know what Rachel is singing. I thought she was singing 'la la la la, la señor,' until I found out it was 'last to know.'"

That's the thing about every Visqueen song--the choruses are entirely infectious, whether you know the words or not. And those choruses are what will get the band their hopes and dreams. Flotard relates a story about one high point already hit--being introduced to Eddie Vedder: "He turned and pointed to the Visqueen pin on his backpack and said, 'I know you, you're the singer of this band.' That pretty much curled my toes as far as dreams go."