Okay, this SFist has complained in the past about indie rock. It's not the indie part so much as the rock part -- all too often we find that it's "rawk" instead of "rock." Fauxhawk instead of mohawk. Post-punk instead of punk. Blues-influenced instead of bluesy. You get our drift. Look, we like danceable stuff, with syncopated rhythms, groovy baselines, horns and/or an organ. You can keep your crunchy guitars and self-reflexive lyrics to yourself, thank you very much. So that's why we were so surprised when we started tapping our feet and nodding our head in time to the bands at Mesh's Spring Spectacular party on Saturday night at the Rickshaw stop. After the jump: sport coats, Pat Benatar boots and our conversion to the church of Jillian Iva.

Due to a mixup (for some idiotic reason we thought the show was at 12 Galaxies and spent half an hour waiting for the damn 49 Van Ness), we missed the opening set by D.O.D. We did get there in time for Lookout! Records darlings Communique. Five natty white boys playing power-pop are normally set off our reverse-prejudice alarms, but they were tight and loud and uptempo, and we passed from tolerance to acceptance before their set was finished. The lead singer's tone hovers somewhere between Coldplay's Chris Martin and Morrisey, and like Coldplay, the band has a flair for creating emotional peaks with string crescendos (obviously just guitars in this case, but we could totally see Phil Spector giving them the 'wall of sound' treatment).

And hey, they even have a San Francisco song, which means they've got the inside track on joining the elite club of EssEff guilty pleasure bands (read: Journey). Highlights include harmonies between the frontman and lead guitarist, and a great anthem backed by a keyboard line played with the 'Hammond and Leslie' setting -- check them out on iTunes. But oh, it got so much better.

First of all, Jillian Iva is a force of nature. Had we not seen the show, we might balk at Brian Brophy saying "[s]he’s got lungs like Aretha Franklin and moves like Tina Turner in her prime." But it's totally true. And on top of the rock-solid foundation laid by Elizabeth Davis-Simpson on bass, Kelly Harris on drums and Becky Kupersmith on keys, she imparts real soul into the song structures. We won't get into how hott these chicks are because it doesn't matter -- Von Iva could be four fat, wrinkly men from a coal-mining town in West Virgina and we wouldn't care.

There's an uptempo funk to Von Iva, and needless to say, we don't miss any guitars in their arrangements. The keyboard lines are straight from the playbook of P-Funk's Bernie Worrell, the bass some beautiful bastard born of early Black Sabbath and David Bowie, held together by four-to-the-floor, boom-snick-boom-snick beats. Jillian moves around the stage like a whirlwind, all legs and wild hair. The be-blazered boys with their popped collars and girls in tight jeans, heeled boots and streaked hair were more than happy to join her in moving to the music.

We noted musical allusions to both Air and Pearl Jam in different songs, and the danceable punk manifesto written by the Ramones is an obvious influence. How good are they? Not only are we running to Amoeba for their record, we'll be paying to see them in the future, for sure. If this bl*wj*b of a review doesn't convince you, check out some tracks from their eponymous debut EP. We promise it would make your granny wanna move and shake.