It's a cold October night, and Kara Lafty and Joann Schmidt just got back from a singing class at Temple. Wait. Kara Lafty? Is taking singing lessons?

It's true. The Philly frontwoman—whose lustrous voice has been wooing this town since the early 1990s in the bands Moped, Sonny Sixkiller, The Dirty Triplets and, currently, The Jane Anchor—is enrolled in a night class called "Learning to Sing."

She's got a binder full of operatic sheet music. In the top right corner of the page dedicated to a ditty called "An Die Musik," Lafty has scrawled the phrase "Caution kills good singing!"

It's something the instructor said once, and it struck a chord. After a decade writing songs, playing guitar and belting her guts out onstage, Lafty has come to trust her instincts and follow the music.

Whether she's writing a catchy rock chorus or standing in front of a class singing "Scarborough Fair" a capella, Lafty says it comes down to confidence. That's a lot of what she'll get out of the class.

"We're not going to sing Jane Anchor songs in German," laughs Schmidt, who plays bass in the band and is being groomed for a backup singer role.

Honed and polished in all her earlier musical projects, Lafty's signature style—call it finessed aggression—has arrived at a self-assured comfort zone on The Jane Anchor's first full-length, Second Wave (Lark Lane). It's a smart, assertive, emotive reflection of her reborn songwriting courage. Live show staples "Crawl," "Sinner" and "Give Me a Reason" are polished and preserved. Intense new tracks such as the fierce "Skyline" and introspective "Anniversary" rock out, but meticulously. No surprise there; Lafty's a perfectionist.

"We're starting from the ground up on this one," says Lafty. She started the Lark Lane label with Brian Wilkinson from Grandfabric as a way to put out their own music on their own terms. Eventually they hope to work with other artists.

"Kara's always had a very strong will about how she wants her music to sound," says guitarist/backup vocalist John Faye. "I'm always fascinated at the direction the music goes within that vision. I tend to be very into letting her take it wherever she will." The rest of the band agrees. Lafty's vision is key.

"They don't try to change things. They just try to make it better," says Lafty, who likes to e-mail acoustic demos to her bandmates.

This band conveys emotion and strength with its personal lyrics and slick rock "n' roll maneuvers (snappy hooks, well-placed solos), but doesn't lean on the overt conventions of intensity, like screaming, muddy distortion pedals or crashing china-boy cymbals. Those things are too messy for a band known for its tightness.

You'd probably suspect this is a result of relentless rehearsals turning the pop magic into reflex. Not so. This band hardly practices. You could also point to Faye, Schmidt and drummer Dave Anthony all playing together in another rock band, IKE, but those guys hardly practice either.

The reality is that The Jane Anchor knows the value of rhythm. They're kept in line by drummer Anthony's driving beats and backed by the fact that everyone else in The Jane Anchor is or was a drummer in one band or another.

So they complement each other musically, like on "Cast Down," wherein piano duties were split between Lafty's left hand and Schmidt's right. "After the "Learning To Sing' class, we're gonna take piano," says Lafty.

She smiles when asked what she writes songs about. But she doesn't offer much. All she'll say is "Venus" is about a revelation and, yes, "Skyline" has a 9/11 theme. Don't even try to get the songwriter to explain "Sinner," which seems to be Lafty at her most seething and smart-ass. Using a wealth of images and a sparseness of total words, she says pretty much all she has to say on the matter. It's a practice born of shyness that gives Second Wave an air of timelessness and universality.

"The best song she's ever written is "Summer,'" says Faye. "You rubbed off all over me/ I tried to scrape it away/ but you wouldn't leave," sings Lafty like a force of nature. "That's the best example of her lyrics being vague and yet being an arrow through your heart," adds Faye. "I love that song, and all I do is sing backup vocals on it."

"I've been playing music for 10 years now, but for some reason—and I don't know what it is—everything feels completely different," Lafty says.

"There are no questions. I question everything else in life, but I don't question music. Because I've gotten to that point; I'm just doing anything that I can to make me happy, really. To get the music out there and hopefully make other people happy. There's no caution, you know?"

The Jane Anchor plays Sat., Nov. 6, 8 p.m., $15, with Grandfabric and DJ Sara Sherr, Indre Studios, 1418 S. Darien St., www.thejaneanchor.com.