It was early on a drizzly September Friday and just a few industry types, hipsters, and Japanese ESL students were on hand for the rerelease of Kiss the World, the debut CD from Catlow. Bandleader Natasha Thirsk was shocked that anyone showed up for her showcase at the Media Club, but an air of mild surprise appears to be an essential part of Thirsk's music, and her charm.

"There are so many other things to do tonight," said the diminutive singer, looking rather waiflike in her short party dress, while greeting guests at the door. "Why would they be here?" Her midlength blond 'do, parted boyishly on the side, made her unrecognizable from the cover photo, in which she sports a short, dark mop of '80s-style hair reminiscent of Duran Duran album art.

Kiss the World, which filters elements of the Go-Go's, PJ Harvey, and Luscious Jackson through a decidedly post-grunge sensibility, already had a curious business history culminating in this particular night. It was released on the local Boompa label last June, with Universal offering a loose distribution deal. But after a better offer from rival megacompany EMI, the disc was withdrawn until the fall. So an album that wasn't officially out until fall had already been reviewed and spun on radio in early summer. Hence an artist's concern that anyone would bother to attend its second coming-out party.

Still, there were enough people on hand by 8:30 to make it worthwhile for Thirsk to strap on her Telecaster and join her backing trio to bang out a three-tune mini-set, culminating in "The Weekend", the album's first single. To put it simply, the song is the kind of overdriven, three-and-a-half-minute fun ride that makes pop music equally worthwhile for hormone-addled teens and grizzled scene veterans.

Other Kiss cuts, however, have far different tinges, from the Jill Sobule-style folk of "Sun in My Eyes" to the title number's amyl nitrate-fuelled disco to the dark-edged electronica of "Dose". Ultimately, though, the Catlow record hangs together as a unified statement-something made even more remarkable when you discover that the creation of this World was divided between different producers and side musicians in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Thirsk wrote the tunes, though, and her guitar-playing-alternately gutsy and highly ornamented-centres her unique blend of disparate sounds.

"I have a pretty self-taught style," she said during a call some time after the Media Club event. "Apparently, people enjoy the wacky way I twist my fingers around to make chords."

The singer-songwriter may be an autodidact, but she grew up in an environment guaranteed to bring out her inner musician. Her pianist mother met her husband in church, where he was playing standup bass and soprano saxophone in the Royal Heirs, a white gospel outfit that gigged for something close to 30 years.

"They were Christian," she states, "but not Christian to the hilt."

Still, Thirsk went to religious schools until Grade 5, and this at least afforded her repeated exposure to black gospel sounds. In her early years, the closest she got to actual pop music was an old player piano in the house, with cylinders that contained what she refers to as "old songs", such as "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown".

Thirsk, who was sickly and housebound as a child, took intensive classical piano lessons and "skipped through the grades", she recalls.

"I just took to it right away; I had an innate sense for melody, I guess. And the play between left and right hands fascinated me."

At 12, she began writing "stupid songs" for the hell of it. "I still have some on tape. My sister was always a singer, so I never thought of myself that way; I was always more of a songwriter. But I had songs inside me and needed to get them out, and that meant having to sing them."

In the 1990s, older sis Kristy Thirsk, currently in the Nettwerk band Delerium, got known through her work in the Rose Chronicles. And younger brother Jamie worked as a DJ, using the nom du disque James Divine among other handles. In high school, the younger Thirsk sister worked with a techno-punk outfit-she retains her fascination with the New Order niche-and continued to expand her keyboard horizon. Then she bought a small Gibson guitar for a hard-to-believe $30, and covered the vintage acoustic in stickers. It became and still is her main writing tool.

"Every person who picks this up thinks it's an awesome guitar, even though I haven't changed the strings in five years."

As the last decade ended, Thirsk-who plays the Media Club this Saturday (December 17) with Catlow-found her voice with the Dirtmitts and indulged in occasional hip-hop collaborations with DJs Vinyl Ritchie and Brian Carson, in their Wicked Lester offshoot. Carson, in fact, helped her produce "The Weekend" and other late entries to the Kiss sessions, most of which happened when a chance meeting in Seattle hooked her up with drummer Al Sgro and bassist Wil Golden, who were firing up a new studio in L.A.

"They were looking for a guinea pig, and I happened to stick my neck out," is her modest summation. The name Catlow, by the way, she writes off as an afterthought. Maybe, but it does suggest a kind of kitten-with-a-whip attitude that well suits her whole solo thing-whether anyone's in the room or not.