Go, Tigers!

In the Great North, they've got the aurora borealis. For everybody else, there's Rock 'n' Bowl.

It's Wednesday Night Quarter Mania at Mission Bowl, and grease is in the air. Hot dogs, fries, tots, nachos and other treats are going for mere quarters. At the snack counter, a young man in a long-sleeved, tomato-red shirt squeezes ketchup evenly onto three hot dogs lined up side by side.

This man and dozens of other townies have driven through torrents of ice and snow — weather shitty enough to make Johnson Drive a death luge — to be here.

There's a certain amount of pride that comes with feeling right at home in a suburban bowling alley. Especially on a night when the TV weather people are telling you to set your ass at home and stay there.

A special ribbon should go to tonight's visitors, here all the way from midtown Kansas City.

Tonight's celebrity bowlers: the Republic Tigers.

Having paid their $8 each for unlimited bowling from 10 p.m. to midnight, the five rock-and-roll dandies lace up their pink-and-neon-yellow shoes. No one rushes up for autographs. Local music celebrity doesn't get you far in Mission. Two of them are married. One of them isn't yet 21. All of them are poor. Tonight they just want to have fun.

As the black lights come up, setting aglow shoes, lanes, white clothing, teeth, eyeballs, dandruff and pet hair, a screen descends over two of the center lanes, and music videos begin to play. Sound blasts through the bowling alley.

Finger Eleven, Nickelback, Angels and Airwaves, Sevendust — bathetic mainstream bands sell their products on the screen.

The Tigers hurl their 10- and 12-pound balls down the lanes with the grace of ballerinas whose feet are planted in buckets.

"I'm not very good," says Ryan Pinkston, the 20-year-old keyboard player. "But I give it my all."

The band's frontman, Kenn Jankowski, 30 years old and taking this shit seriously, has just bowled two strikes in a row.

"Kenn's got good form," guitarist Adam McGill observes.

"I am the most competitive person in Kansas City," Jankowski says as he returns to the table where his bandmates smoke around the same ashtray.

The Tigers' leader makes these sorts of bold statements all the time, though it's hard to know whether he's done the research to back up his claims. A week ago, over drinks at the Twin City Tavern, he said of the Tigers, "There's more talent in this band than any band I've ever heard of in the world."

Jankowski isn't so much arrogant as defiant. He and the other Tigers are desperate to make music, make a name for themselves — or at least make a living.

"Dude, I got fired from Radio Shack a year ago," bassist Marc Pepperman, 26, says. "I couldn't keep a $6-an-hour job to save my life. I suck at everything but this."

Though Jankowski was in a band that had a short run at the top before falling apart, the other Tigers have never been part of an outfit this serious or with this much potential.

The band arrived on the scene just over a year ago with inspired, guitar-and-keyboard-based pop more layered and majestic than anything else in town. Now, the Tigers have signed a deal that should put the band out front of an industrywide change in the way bands get their music heard.

The contract is with a new label called Chop Shop Records. It's an imprint of Atlantic Records that was founded last spring by a woman named Alexandra Patsavas, whom you may know better than you think.

If you associate the swooning indie rock of bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Snow Patrol and the Fray with Roswell, The O.C., Grey's Anatomy and various other prime-time TV dramas, then you're familiar with Patsavas' work.

She is the most influential music supervisor in television. She has started a record label. And the Republic Tigers are the label's first act.

Several weeks before the Tigers' bowl-a-rama, I stand in Jankowski's bedroom, watching him trace vocal patterns in the air with his hands. I've just asked him how many vocal tracks are in "Made Concrete," a soaring composition with call-and-response choral singing. He doesn't have a number. He gestures with his hands: a track in the upper-right corner of the mix, one in the upper-left, high harmonies here, Adam's backing vocals here.

More than just a singer, Jankowski is a vocal architect. Almost all of the vocal tracks for the upcoming album, which is still being mastered at a studio in Los Angeles, were recorded, manipulated and layered to the high heavens in Jankowski's bedroom.

Here, bare walls frame a dirty hardwood floor. Clothes are strewn over instrument cases and video-game controllers in the corner. The bed is a mattress propped on its end against the wall. A bare bulb with a dangling cord lights the spartan squalor.

It's a strange environment for a guy who claims he brushes his teeth 20 times a day and stays in the shower "until there's no chance of any soapy residue being on my body."