Wednesday: So Many Wizards at Cafe Du Nord with A B & the Sea and What Laura SaysMore >>

Openers is back and rejiggered for the weekend. So here we go -- four bands opening sweet shows this weekend that you oughta not miss:

Thursday: Kid Meets Cougar at Milk with Religious Girls, Boyz IV Men, and Tussle

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Trevor Traynor

Richie Cunning

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With SF Popfest firing up this Thursday -- and spring tour season in full-bloom -- show-goers should anticipate plenty of hot opening bands this week. Here are five that deserve a solid effort on your part to get there early. Remember, you'll have the whole summer to swill PBR on long afternoons.

Tuesday: Hosannas at Hemlock Tavern with Maus Haus and Boomsnake.

Please, God, not another sensitive indie-rock quartet from Portland! But the skilled songs of these innovative rockers prove surprising. Synth textures you don't hear daily, gorgeous mutlipart vocal harmonies, acidic guitars and acres of negative space sound like, well, sorta like the product of brothers who grew up loving both Kraftwerk and The Beach Boys. Though they belong under the umbrella of indie rock, Hosannas prove far more interesting than most bands wearing that badge.

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Blood and Sunshine

​This isn't the kind of week where you need to worry about smelling of sweat, booze, and reckless abandon in front of your boss every single morning. But some excellent acts will grace S.F. stages in the next few days, and with them a hearty selection of openers. So slide out of the office, shoot your Jimmy Beam, and do whatever else you gotta -- just get there early for:

Wednesday: Blood and Sunshine with Lime Colony and Passenger and Pilot at Bottom of the Hill. If you've ever thought electro-pop and shoegaze could use a boost of Memphis groove and soulful vocals, San Francisco duo Blood and Sunshine play for you. James Brennan and Joseph Macrino lay down taut R&B rhythms with modern tools, then layer thick gospel and soul melodies over their the beats for more in-your-face spirit than most electro-pop duos bother with. Intimate numbers like the Tom Waitsian ballad "Cigarettes and LSD" show these boys aren't all big-sound swagger, either.

Thursday: Fake Drugs with Tempo No Tempo at Milk, and Friday with Starfucker, The Butterfly Bones and Silver Swans at Rickshaw Stop. Drake Fugs, the latest full-legnth by Portland's Fake Drugs, is a hipster-disco treat: booming, distorted disco beats, buzzing synth melodies, reverb-y guitar cuts, and hazily seductive and self-obsessed vocals. No colors the Faint weren't already reviving with more flamboyance (albeit less edge) in, like, 1999. But if you're heading to either of these shows, you'd better not miss them.

Friday: Christopher Willits with Johann Johannsson at Great American Music Hall. San Francisco's Willits melds guitar with out-there laptop wizardry and live electronics, painting beautiful, billowing atmospheres out of bleeps, licks, and backing tracks. Mostly instrumental, his extended pieces wander from spacey post-rock to free jazz and back -- sometimes leaving a beautiful pop melody behind. Willits is playing Friday under his own name, but the ever-busy audiophile has a host of other collaborative projects also worth checking out.

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Fang Island

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Five nights of solid shows and at least one good band to kick off each one. So head out and get your grub 'n' sauce on if you gotta -- but don't dawdle past the start times of these excellent openers:

Tuesday: Weekend with The Mantles and Dimmer at Rickshaw Stop.
S.F. trio Weekend churns out unapologetically noisy, droning shoegaze-psych that recalls the dim punk of Joy Division as much as it does My Bloody Valentine. The band finds beauty in repetitive, hazy textures. Though initially difficult, the group's songs are deeply evocative. And with "Love + Death" listed as influences, you know these guys are just as serious as their forbears.

Wednesday: Snowblink with Owen Pallett at the Independent
The delicate tones of Daniela Gesundheit's voice elicit both a girlish innocence and the equivocations of adulthood. Sounding kinda like Feist -- though Gesundheit's based in Toronto and California -- her chords flutter and sweep over reverby folk struts and sweet acoustic cradles. Sometimes sad, sometimes cheerful, always beautiful -- and with choruses like "Sing Me An Oak Tree" -- Gesundheit's band Snowblink wanders a beautiful line through modern indie-folk. (Download sample tracks here.) 

Thursday: Baths with White Hinterland and Dosh at Bottom of the Hill.
Parked between spacey chillwave and glitchy beatmaking, Will Wiesenfeld makes bedroom pop that feels as right through headphones as it does in the club. His Anticon debut, which comes out next month, will make a hazy, thumping soundtrack to sun-filled summer days. And as for the name, well, Wiesenfeld just really likes taking baths, OK? 

Friday: Fang Island with Red Sparowes and Oxbow at Great American Music Hall.
If Andrew W.K. went Animal Collective, the result might sound like the deconstructed, high-energy party rock of Brooklyn's Fang Island. The band's latest, self-titled full-length kicks off with fireworks, which then morph into chugging guitars, fevered keys, and head-nodding tempos that tussle and ride over each other, but keep a constant positive vibe. Shared vocals sound like a club full of stoked drunk people shouting -- and that elation's worth witnessing.

Sunday: Nurses with The Tallest Man On Earth at the Independent.
This Portland trio plays psych-folk that's both eerie and dreary. Vocalist Aaron Chapman has a wriggly worm of a cry. But even with the alien schizophrenia that its high pitch evokes -- and the dusty-sounding, slightly out-of-tune instruments that back Chapman up -- when Nurses go for it, they can't help but pluck heartstrings.

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Best Coast

​Coachella tour mayhem may be in the past, but we're set for another busy week of spring shows here in the city -- opening bands included. A few best bets are below:

Wednesday: Best Coast
The guitar pop of Best Coast sounds like its been blasted through the smog of a Los Angeles afternoon. Lumped in with surf-noise Southern Californians like Wavves and Crocodiles, the songs of this heavily hyped L.A. trio certainly evoke a hazy warmth. But catchy pop melodies shine through their no-fi noise pollution and make for a breezy, heartbroken brand of rock you'll be sad to miss. With Camera Obscura at Great American Music Hall.

Thursday: Cosmetics 
Vancouver lovers Nic M and Aja Emma conspire to make dark, minimalist disco. With their ghostly synth lines and breathy vocals, Cosmetics capture a gloomy, distant corner of the '80s. But lyrics like "I get a feeling of pleasure/ When I wear black leather" show that they know dance music is supposed to be fun. With the Fresh & Onlys, Bare Wires, and Blank Dogs at Eagle Tavern.

Saturday: Sic Alps 
Sic Alps are just one of three awesome bands opening for Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore this week -- first up are poppy Glaswegians Camera Obscura on Thursday and S.F. kingpins Thee Oh Sees on Friday. But we're most excited for the ruthless guitar noise of locals Sic Alps, whose sound is more brute than psych. Garage ain't clean, but Sic Alps' songs are so dirty you can't help but grin as they grind 'em out. 

Micachu and the Shapes

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Openers has spring fever this week -- with so many so many excellent opening bands performing, we can't possibly pick one to recommend. Instead, here's a great opener for each night this week. Some of these shows are already sold out -- it's pre-Coachella insanity here -- and some acts listed are better than their headliners, but these are all worth showing up early for:

Tuesday: Micachu and the Shapes. Wild sonic adventures from the mischievous mind of Brit Mica Levi. She pasted her restless art-pop textures and loony ramblings together on Jewellery, one of the best (and most unique) albums of last year. With Spoon and Deerhunter at Fox Theater.

Wednesday: Bachelorette. Annabel Alpers recounts fear and longing in robotic tones and icy harmonies, illuminated by sunny keys or laser harpischords, and bouncing along to cheap retro beats. The music is remote and moody, but also rich and humane. With Beach House at Bimbo's.

Thursday: Delorean. The group is as silvery and futuristic as its namesake automobile seemed in Back to the Future. Elysian space-disco so bright and catchy you don't notice it slowly taking over your mind (and that of major label execs) as it repeatedly utters the command: Dance ... and play this song again. With Miike Snow at The Independent.

Friday: The xx. Taught, sexy boy-girl duets inside spare, seductive beat-pop. This Brit trio's self-titled debut was easily a highlight of last year, and its last S.F. show managed to transmit every drop of its sweet, dreamy nothings to a properly adoring audience. With Hot Chip at the Fox theater.

Saturday: Sleigh Bells. The definition of noise pop. Girl vocals -- at times sweetly melodic, at times shrill and screamy -- over huge beats run through a hundred distortion pedals and brushed with a fuzzed-out guitar melodies. With Yeasayer at The Fillmore.

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Rock 'n' roll isn't as complicated as the hyphen-happy critical world makes it out to be. For all the differences alleged between, say, the blues-rock of The Rolling Stones and the alt-rock of Pavement, a prefix-less guitar band can show how similar those styles really are. The Dead Trees are just such a band. With a taste for jangly guitar pop and the Malkmus-y, conversational voice of main vocalist Michael Ian Cummings, the Los Angeles-via-Portland quartet definitely scratches the 90s slacker-rock itch. But their cover of the John Lennon tune "Surprise Surprise" and originals like "D.R. C. 1991" show off a taste for vintage barroom rock more rollin'-and-tumblin' than anything Pavement ever put out. Fiery, fun, guitar-driven songs are the mainstay here -- and that's all the description you need.

The Dead Trees open for Moldy Peaches alum Adam Green at Cafe Du Nord tonight and tomorrow night, and we highly recommend you get there early enough to catch their smile-spreading lesson in the genealogy of rock.

The Dead Trees
With Adam Green
at Cafe Du Nord
April 6 and 7

Follow us @SFAllShookDown.

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Cherish the singer-songwriter who knows how to hang when things get dirty. Garrett Pierce writes slow, somber acoustic ballads that are more beautiful than most, but that's not all he does. Grittier rock numbers such as "Lioness & Lion," "Tonight," and "Old Country" show that Pierce can wield a cranked amp with the same deft touch as an acoustic -- and that he can squeeze longing out of a dragging rock tempo.

Pierce used to live in S.F., but moved to Davis shortly before the release of his current album, All Masks, to focus on songwriting and to escape what he's described as the distractions and dark vibes of city life. He almost seems too soft for some of the stories his image-laden, lyric-heavy songs relate. But told through his precious, breathy whine, Pierce's tales convey every bit of his sensitivity: "I just lay just a door from where we were naked through the dawning/ But you say what you say, say it now, say it loud/ 'Cuz you've got a schedule to keep," he sings on "Fireworks," which also includes the line, "My love is a weapon you're avoiding."

Pierce is first up on a three-part bill at Rickshaw Stop this Wednesday that includes SF darling Emily Jane White -- herself a skilled practitioner of the downbeat ballad. Headlining are the more experimental, minimalist Portland duo of Laura Gibson and Ethan Rose. But Pierce's songs, which wander gorgeously through both dirt and delicacy, are worth showing up early for.

Garrett Pierce
Opening for Emily Jane White; Laura Gibson and Ethan Rose
at the Rickshaw Stop, Wed. March 31

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The Bay Area has the psychedelic side of rock well-covered. From the acid-soaked experiments of 1960s San Francisco ballrooms to the PBR-sloshing sweat happenings of today's garages, we have the druggy, disjointed sound down.

Bands like The Myonics, a five-piece East Bay outfit that's opening Friday's show at El Rio, keep that long-burning psych flame alive. With chatty boy-girl vocals and a 'yeah, we're-awkward' attitude, The Myonics swirl in a bit of They Might Be Giants with their fuzzed-out garage grooves. They'll be joined onstage Friday by Billy Miller, who played in the 1960s and 70s with 13th Floor Elevators headmaster Roky Erickson and led a cult-favorite Austin group called Cold Sun. It should be a multi-generational psych-fest to remember -- our local specialty.

The Myonics
Friday, March 26 at El Rio w/ Loaded for Bear and Life in 24 Frames.