Carpooling, it's the way to go especially on a busy weekend. Skipping past a ton of cars, not having to pay for the toll and dropping about 15 minutes from the ride over to San Francisco is a nice thing. My friends and I get to Bottom of the Hill about 5 minutes before the show starts and I get a ticket for the Cursive, The Velvet Teen, Race for Titles show that's coming up this Thursday. I'll practically be living at Bottom of the Hill the next couple weeks with all the shows that are coming up.

The 1st band up was My Chemical Romance, which is from New Jersey and on Eyeball Records, which has released earlier stuff from the big boys Thursday and Midtown. My Chemical Romance came out and started their 1st song and I think the singer must be an Andrew WK fan because he was doing some of his head banging moves. The band had some pretty good energy. One song that I did notice of theirs that they played was "Vampires Will Never Hurt You". If you're in to bands like The Used or Taking Back Sunday you'd probably want to check these guys out.

Up next was Noise Ratchet, who I really didn't know much about at all other than they're on The Militia Group and from San Diego I believe. They sounded a little harder than I expected them to be. The singer walked around and climbed up on the pillar on stage. These guys must have a big following in Southern California since their website says they've sold over 3,000 albums and on their mp3.com site they have over 320,000 downloads but I really didn't see what the big deal was. The music was alright, but nothing really grabbed me.

The boys from Seattle were up next, Minus the Bear on Suicide Squeeze Records. The last time I saw these guys was when they played Bottom of the Hill with The Velvet Teen and they had an EP called "Bands Like it When You Yell "Yar" at Them". New they have out their full length album and of course when the band came out the crowd yelled "Yar" at them. They played a couple songs off their 1st EP like "Lemurs, Man, Lemurs" and "Pantsuit, Uggghhh" along with quite a few songs off their new album as well. Minus the Bear plays so well together, everything in the band seems to be so smooth. I think that they have gotten better live since I saw them last and the new songs are really good as well, definitely a band to check out.

The band Piebald were up last which everyone was waiting for and they did not disappoint. The last time I saw them I believe they were still living in Boston and they have made the move to Los Angeles since then, along with Travis having throat surgery. Some of the songs they cranked out were "All You Need is Drums to Start a Dance Party" and off the latest album "American Hearts", "Long Nights", "Rich People Can Breed" which has some great photos by Jeremy Weiss(www.day19.com). Travis' throat is doing good after the surgery and it sounded plenty good. I'm not sure if it's something about Bottom of the Hill or what but almost every time I go to a show there, hardly anyone jumps around at all and stares at the band. This really baffles me since kids stand up front for the whole show and then just stare at the band that they waited so long for. Most of the people didn't even sing along with them or anything, but there were a decent amount of kids jumping around but not to what I would expect. Travis got to the end of the set and said we have one song left and then one after that. They ended up closing their set with "Grace Kelly with Wings" and they headed off.