Substance comes first for soulDecision

Things could get crazy for soulDecision from here on.
 
 Arriving in stores today, the Toronto trio's debut -- modestly titled No One Does It Better -- is a self-written collection of swoony R&B ballads and uptempo dance-pop tracks (many in the mould of George Michael's Fastlove), delivered by clean-cut, hunky guys and buffed to a glossy sheen by Savage Garden/Ace of Base producer Charles Fisher. Stuff like this is hot with the kids nowadays, don't ya know.
 
 The success of their debut single Faded suggests soulDecision could become the next teen-pop sensation, especially after the exposure they'll receive on their current tour with Prozzak, which arrives at the Saddledome on Thursday.
 
 If so, these are the days before the storm.
 
 "Yeah, we just hope there's a storm at the end of it all," David Bowman, one of the group's three multi-instrumentalists, says in a telephone interview.
 
 Even if that storm involves 14-year-old girls screaming at you wherever you go?
 
 "Umm, hopefully they'll be a bit older," replies Bowman, coyly refusing to divulge the band members' ages except to say they're all in their early to mid-20s.
 
 "We've known that's part of the thing ... and that's totally cool. Fans are fans. It doesn't really matter. And if you actually have any, you should be counting your blessings."
 
 Unlike many teen-pop acts, there was no Svengali behind the scenes assembling the band. Bowman, Ken Lewko and primary songwriter Trevor Guthrie met six years ago at Capilano Music College in Vancouver.
 
 They started writing and performing together, but rarely in public. Grunge was big at the time and they didn't do grunge.
 
 "We were doing pop music at a time when it really wasn't cool to be doing that," says Bowman, the group's one non-blond.
 
 "It was the Soundgarden-Nirvana kind of thing going on. Many people were going: 'What they hell are you guys doing?' We were doing this long before The Backstreet Boys made pop a cool thing to do."
 
 Feeling like they were going nowhere on the West Coast, they relocated to Toronto "where the people who sign the cheques are," Bowman points out. They shopped a demo version of No One Does It Better and eventually signed to Universal Music Canada.
 
 When the album is released internationally later this year, the trio will be faced with the challenge of standing out from the thousands of other cutesy teen-pop acts.
 
 Bowman, for one, is not concerned.
 
 "When people come to see us live and actually see us playing our music and we're singing it and we're not doing, you know, eight-minute dance routines to our songs, they'll understand there's some substance behind that," he says.
 
 No shaking of bon-bons then?
 
 "We can dance," he stresses, "but we choose not to. We can shake it, but there ain't no Ricky Martin s--- going on. That's never been our thing."