BY JUD COST

A couple of patrons wedged into a packed house at Bimbo's 365 Club were fervently expressing their devotion to She & Him on the second night of three sold-out performances. "We love you, Matt," they screamed repeatedly at M. Ward, the guitar-wielding "Him" of the superstar duo whose other half is noted film actress/vocalist Zooey Deschanel. Of course, this is San Francisco where anything goes, and the hyperactive fans in question were guys. "Isn't this the most attractive band you've ever seen?" asked the unflappable Deschanel.

Make no mistake about it, Deschanel is not just the best of a current bunch of movie stars moonlighting as indie-rockers, a list that includes Minnie Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Russell Crowe. She might just be the finest young singer out there, period. With a voice that borrows just enough of the backwoods vulnerability of Skeeter Davis and the uptown, jilted-girlfriend stance of Leslie Gore, Deschanel is a revelation. And she has a satchelful of self-penned songs that might have come from Carole King's glory days as a Brill Building whiz kid.

Of course, Deschanel couldn't ask for a better partner in this affair than Matt Ward, who emerges from the stage-left  shadows every now and then with always appropriate guitar passages that range from tastefully reverbed picking to subtle slide work that sometimes sounds more Hawaiian than Delta blues. Ward's occasional strangled croak of a voice is never less than a perfect fit with Deschanel's upbeat style. This could be Sonny & Cher for a new generation!

The backing band of She & Him is almost as talented as the headliners. Mike Coykendall, who engineered some of the Portland, Ore. sessions for Volume One, the pair's recent debut album on Merge, handles rhythm guitar; Davey Faragher, last seen in town accompanying Tinseltown songbird Jenny Lewis, plays bass; Tennessee Thomas, the daughter of longtime Elvis Costello percussionist Pete Thomas, upholds the family tradition on drums; and Becky Stark adds delicious backup vocals and a sincerely wacky vibe to everything she does.

Stark's own combo, Lavender Diamond, opened the show with a pedestrian set that moped along in a Joni Mitchell vein until suddenly Stark caught fire on her last tune. She cleared the cobwebs from the rafters with her near-operatic range on a stunning, lyric-less finale-something she should do a lot more of earlier in her program.

Although Deschanel-named for a character in a J.D. Salinger book that followed his groundbreaking 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye-grew up in L.A., somewhere in her travels she's managed to soak up just a bit of a Dixie accent. It serves her well on buoyant flag-wavers "I Was Made for You" and "Sweet Darlin,'" a pair of tunes as exciting as anything Dusty Springfield (or Duffy) ever cut. "Take It Back" finds Ward and Deschanel together at the piano for an after-hours love duet. "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" uses the changes from "Dear Prudence" for a joyous, harmony-laced downhill ski run that has both Deschanel and Stark jumping up and down by song's end. "I Thought I Saw Your Face Again" has half the band whistling the tune's lead break in unison.

Happy fans, too, were whistling as they skipped out into the midnight drizzle with Deschanel's exhortation to vote still ringing in their ears. With rampant unemployment, broken-down retirement plans, a couple of wars and a disintegrating planet as the legacy of the George W. Bush years, She & Him just might have been the pre-election night soundtrack for a bright new outlook.

Happy days, indeed, could be here again.