The strange thing about the local supergroup Aviation Blondes is that it may not have happened if it weren't for Katrina.

Steve Morrison, onetime guitarist of the popular Pittsburgh band The Affordable Floors, had moved to New Orleans in the late '90s after his Bloomfield apartment burned down.

Morrison went south at the prompting of his mother and brother, and was working for the company that produces the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival while also working on a solo record. Then, Katrina hit in August 2005. Unlike the fire, the water spared his apartment but he figured it was good time to get out of Louisiana and head back to Pittsburgh. He was missing his old friends here anyway.

His homecoming ended up being a tribute show to the late New Wave station WXXP at the Rex with the Affordable Floors. Later that year, he entered a demo into the Graffiti Rock Challenge before he even had the musicians lined up to play. When it was accepted, Morrison rallied guitarist Daryl Cross, bassist Rod Schwartz (11th Hour), drummer Troy Cramer (Ritual Space Travel Agency) and backup singer Lexi Rebert (Salena Catalina).

"We were out in the first round," Schwartz says, with a laugh. "We basically had two practices. He basically called and said, 'I'm in a bind, can you learn 10 songs?' "

Having joined the likes of Rusted Root and The Clarks as Rock Challenge losers, Aviation Blondes then went about the business of preparing for a proper takeoff.

"We basically spent about two years trying to play every style of music, trying to find out what we wanted to do," Schwartz says. "We had a whole batch of stuff -- alt-country, rock, you name it, there were probably six or seven different styles."

What they ended up with, as captured on the band's new Get Hip debut "Edge of Forever," is a perky power-pop sound that harks back to such '80s bands as Blondie and the Bangles. That's because in the workshopping process, Dave Klug (11th Hour, Hector in Paris) replaced Cramer and, more significantly, Morrison ended up demoting himself and giving center stage to Rebert, along with her Salena Catalina partner, singer-keyboardist Jen Fisher.

"At first, she was playing strictly a supporting role," Morrison says of Rebert, "but I wanted to move her into a more prominent role as quickly as possible because she just has so much stage presence and she's a fantastic frontperson, and I was starting to get a picture in my mind of the band that could be if we reconfigured things a little bit.

"Plus," he adds, "I make a boring frontperson. I still sing a few song with the band but you can see people getting a little bored with me at the microphone and Lexi just has this intense charisma. So I started writing songs for her to sing."

The best example would be the lead-off track, "Catch and Release," sung from the point of view of a woman whose hooked "another wretch" but makes it clear "this bird don't nest." Not a lyric that a guy could sing,

"In weird ways," Morrison says, "you have to channel the person you're writing for, so I've had to get in touch with my feminine side a little more. And Lexi has a specific worldview, and some of the songs are sung by Jen, so it's taken me some time to get into their heads and tailor songs that make sense for them to sing."

"Lexi and Jen met at acting school," says Schwartz , who writes some of the songs. "They're just tremendous. They can convey anything we may want in a song. They're just a pleasure to write for."

For Rebert, a thin brunette with vintage dresses and sensuous dance moves, this is a fun departure from the cocktail style of Salena (which is back in action with the return of bassist Pete Bush from Seattle).

"I think it's an honor that they have adjusted their songwriting to fit my personality and my voice and things I relate to," she says. "I'm a really lucky person 'cause I'm not a songwriter, and having somebody adjust their approach in order to accommodate me is really something special."

The '80s power-pop/new wave feel of Aviation Blondes is something the guys in the band experienced, but Rebert and Fisher would have been preschoolers back in that WXXP era. Rebert says she avoided going back and listening to older bands for inspiration.

"I stay away from listening to other music to influence what I do personally because it makes you come off as disingenuous. I've tried to focus on what Steve gives me and then leave it alone and find my own approach to it.

"It's been a great experience to go on that journey and have the ups and downs," she adds. "It's like discovering a new love. You find the things that you have in common and you find the things that you don't and you make them work to your benefit."

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.