Went to Cafe du Nord on Saturday.  One of the better venues of San Francisco, no doubt.

Of the three bands that were there, I really liked both:

Finding Stella - two amazing female voices, and decent songs, cute too.  Harder rocking than Indigo Girls, while definitely not as deep as Indigo Girls either.  A shallower but harder Indigo Girls?  Hmm, I wonder how that works...

Smithpoint - this band is at least as good as other punk-pop rockers, such as Good Charlotte, and they have fun doing it.  Their lead singer has a GREAT voice for pop - and not the typical look, even though he has the typical voice.

Miggs, the headliner.  Well, great voice, good musicianship, but it would be hard to find a group of more "self-important wankers", I would say.  (Am I too old for musicians that simply take themselves so seriously now?)

The women seemed to like them though.

I definitely recommend listening to the first two bands - and kudos to new services like Podbop, without which I wouldn't have been able to spring the low price of 10 bucks, and thus found some pretty good live music to listen to.

Is called Podbop. 

From the description:

"We podcast bands coming to your town"

Now you can LISTEN to bands that are coming to town, see if you like the voice, like the music. NOTE:  The pages are slow to load, but well worth it.

Here is the San Francisco page.


Seriously, this is a long standing problem of mine.  There is a free evening, I want to go out and here music I haven't heard - but how do you know it isn't crap?  Now you can preview! 

Now there only needs to be MORE bands listed.

I've already lined up a couple of bands I want to see.  I'll report on the results next week.