She & Him Pleases They and Us

Julie, Keith, Karolina, and I went to Bimbo’s in San Francisco to see She & Him supported by Lavender Diamond. They were blocking cameras this time, so no pictures, unfortunately.

Lavender Diamond is mostly the band of Becky Stark. A quick glance at the wikipedia page for her reveals a lot of interesting details on the projects she’s working on. The Busby Berkeley style film being made in IMAX to accompany their album sounds very interesting. Lavender Diamond’s sound is somewhat ethereal and when Becky would talk between songs she seemed even more spacey. It’s not music I would buy, but she has a really strong voice and has good band chemistry. She (and I believe the pianist/rhythm guitarist) stayed on to play with the main act.

She & Him are Zooey Deschanel and Matt Ward (M. Ward is his stage name) and they rock. Sometimes it’s just the two of them, sometimes they have a 4 piece backing band, and in either case they are great to listen to. Much like the Jenny Lewis show the music has an earnest, genuine sound that doesn’t have any of the frankly off-putting junk that American Idol churns out. This is music that is distinctly American and really timeless, but still very cool. Toe tapping at the very least.

Oh yeah, and Zooey Deschanel is a babe. She has been on my wow list since Almost Famous. I didn’t know she could even sing until I saw Elf. She was very cute in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie. And then she was almost the only reason I watched the really unfortunately done tv-reimagining of the Wizard of Oz on the Sci-Fi channel: Tin Man where they actually did sneak in a bit of singing for her. M. Ward seemed to get a few hoots and hollers also. It was a very attractive band.