Deco Auto — on the eve of Center of the City — has the right attitude

Last year’s Center of the City was the festival’s biggest, loudest yet, a colossal three-day weekend packed with local and regional punk acts taking over the bar Vandals in April. Vandals is no more, but Center of the City is back for a fourth go-round, with a new home. Beginning Thursday, June 18, and stretching over Friday and Saturday, 34 acts are headed to Harling’s Upstairs, hell-bent on busting speakers and eardrums.

Among the festival veterans is Deco Auto, slated to play its third Center of the City. But the three-piece — guitarist and lead singer Steven Garcia, bassist and singer Tracy Flowers and drummer Pat Tomek — isn’t an obvious booking for an event known for gnarly punk and hardcore.

“Center of the City is punk as fuck,” Garcia says. “We’re not typical. I mean, the stuff I’m writing right now is I guess what I would call power pop — emphasis on the power. It’s loud and it’s bold, but it’s also very melodic.”

That’s fine with Center of the City founder and organizer Mike Alexander.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people see the punk aspect of it as a music thing,” Alexander says of the festival. “It’s really more of a punk attitude and an independent attitude that you have, not necessarily the music you end up playing. I think as long as you have that attitude of zero pretension and are making the music you want to make, that’s what it’s about.”

That description fits The Curse of Deco Auto. The songs on that album, issued this past February, hit hard, especially when Garcia is going to town on his guitar, but are never without a sweet hook. And his voice is both gutsy and crystalline, an ideal tenor to deliver the songs’ sharp edges. Flowers’ harmonies help round that out some, and when she sings lead, as on “The Introduction,” she recalls a less annoying Lisa Loeb. All told, the record pays homage to mid-1990s alternative rock without copycatting much of it, and it plays just fine even with the volume up only halfway or so.

Flowers and Garcia — she good-naturedly calls him the band’s “dictator” rather than its leader; Garcia says his style is “benevolent fascism” — founded Deco Auto in 2011 with then-drummer Michelle Bacon (the Phillistines, Dolls on Fire). By then, seven years had gone by since Flowers moved to Kansas City from Philadelphia with her husband.

“This band gives me a sense of family,” Flowers says. “My family all played music, and when we’re home we all get out our instruments and play together. When I moved to Kansas City, it was like the rug was pulled out from under me.”

For a time, Flowers was playing with Bacon in a band called the Straight Ups — music she describes as “goofy playtime stuff, just for fun.” Things changed when she met Garcia.

“This is the first serious band I’ve ever been in,” Flowers says. “Steve’s been doing music for, like, 15 years longer than I have been. He writes all the songs, he tells us how to play them, and we do what he says. Even if I don’t get it at the time, I trust that he knows where it’s going to go.”

Sitting at a table at Screenland Tapcade, Flowers and Garcia do not seem particularly serious. They are frequently distracted from our conversation either by the (winning) Royals game playing on the large screens on one side of the room, or by Top Gun, playing elsewhere in the room.

This, Garcia and Flowers say, is the essence of their band: good friends, hanging out. All three members are busy: Garcia is a middle school teacher by day, Flowers is a gardener and Tomek — who joined in 2013, after Bacon departed — remains with the Rainmakers. (He’s absent for our interview, Garcia explains, because that storied KC band is playing a festival in Norway.) But Deco Auto offers these three an excuse to take a break from their heavily scheduled lives. What’s more, the band’s longevity has deepened the friendship.

“I think if you’re in a band for, like, a year or two, you’ve probably gotten over some communication hurdles,” Flowers says. “You can be friends with people, but being in a band with someone is just a whole different relationship, because you’re dealing with artistic expression and money and schedules and all these things that are really easy for people to fight over. And if you can get over those hurdles, you’re fine.”