Little Joy is a band that lives up to its name, producing happy pop numbers without being too obnoxiously positive about it. I think the greatest appeal of the group is the way that it sways between styles so effortlessly, both musically and in the mingling of its talented vocalists.

For her part, Shapiro has a delicate, old timey voice, one that you could picture covering jazz standards as easily as she breezed through the group's bittersweet springtime ballad, "Don't Watch Me Dancing." In that way she was a lot like Zooey Deschanel, a singer whose playful, graceful style seems to travel from another time. Shapiro also breezed between instruments, adding accents of glockenspiel and shaker percussion to the songs.
Amarante came off just as unpretentious, all smiles beneath a bushy brown beard and beaming his eyes directly at front row fans for the first couple songs. He was the Latin crooner who cut the difference between bossa-nova influenced numbers and tunes that could almost be Strokes b-sides ("Keep Me In Mind," as well as a new song, written just the day before, that sounded pretty great).

He seemed genuinely excited to be back in San Francisco (he was recently here as part of Devendra Banhart's band, and Banhart handed the set list over to Amarante at one point so they could perform a Little Joy song). Part of his--and the band's general--enthusiasm seemed to come from all the friends they said were in the crowd. There was hardly a break between songs that didn't include some sort of wave, or smile, or shout out to buddy. Amarante even dedicated the single-song encore (which I'm pretty sure was an Os Mutantes cover) to S.F.'s Andy Cabic of Vetiver, who he called the person "who knows more about Brazilian music than anyone else I know.

One more cover--a Mamas & the Papas send up earlier in the evening--helped pad the material from Little Joy's only recording, last year's 11 song eponymous debut. And so it was that around 10:45 p.m., Little Joy's happy party came to a close, leaving us all with memories of a sweet, short, fun set.



Critic's Notebook

By the way: I wish I could say more about openers Leopold and His Fiction besides the fact that the trio's last three songs were impressive. But sadly, those last three songs were all I caught, having eaten across the street at the new Bar Crudo, where kinks in the service kept us there for two hours. Not good--although the fish was delicious.

But having never heard the S.F. act before, my first impressions of Leopold and company were only positive: a mix of folksy Devendra Banhart bits and tougher, Zeppeliny stoner blues, belted out by a frontman who sang like his voice could raise the dead down in Colma. Looks like they're playing the Haight Street Fair next on June 14.