If Thursday’s show at the Red and the Black was any indication, this year’s 6 Points Music Festival looks to be a good one. The local fest, in its fourth year but only its second with a wider reach, aims to someday be a D.C. version of South by Southwest and helped its cause by bringing a diverse indie bill to H Street NE. The show began with Brooklyn’s The Lisps, followed by Chicago’s Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and closed with Detroit’s The Singles. This year’s festival includes more venues outside of Arlington, where the event started, and also includes more bands from around the country, as the opening show demonstrated.

The Thursday night set and the new venue probably resulted in the small crowd, but the bands didn’t perform like it, meaning too many folks missed out on a really fun show from top to bottom. Heather Huff, one of the festival’s organizers, said they would have liked to get a D.C. band for the opening show, which she said would have helped draw a larger audience, but weren’t able to. We hope the quality of this show will help build the buzz for the rest of the festival.

I had been looking forward to seeing headliners The Singles for some time, ever since I got their 2003 debut “Better than Before.” The three piece fit in with the Motor City’s garage rock scene but sound much more 60s than the likes of the White Stripes and Von Bondies. In fact, they wouldn’t look or sound out of place on an old black and white TV with The Kinks and The Animals. Despite the small turnout, the band delivered a big, loud, energetic set, with guitarist and singer Vince Frederick bounding around stage and drummer Brian Thunders ending up thoroughly sweat soaked. Riding their well-reviewed new disc, “Start Again,” the band were coming through D.C. anyway and happened to hook up with the fest.

Second band The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir were neither Scottish nor gospel, but they have had music on that indie tastemaker “The OC,” their cellist is about to go on tour with Bright Eyes, and they’ve been getting love from the blogs. They’re working on a new album, so they only brought three of their usual 10 or so members down, but the guitar-violin-drums lineup was different and interesting to hear. Their full sound is big and bouncy, but smaller still translated well. They’re currently unsigned and have one of the coolest looking CDs out there — an EP made by Microindie which looks just like a mini vinyl album, complete with black ridges and a sleeve with a hole in the center for the label.

The Lisps opened the show with their ebullient, vaudeville-esque indie pop – think a happier Dresden Dolls or a less weird Fiery Furnaces – and got some fans waltzing. And like those two (and Mates of State, another band we were reminded of), they have a co-ed singing duo, Cesar Alvarez and Sammy Tunis. Tunis (who is from the D.C. area) sounds a bit like Jenny Lewis, and the two sing mostly about relationships over quirky, fun acoustic cabaret jams.

All three bands seemed to enjoy themselves on stage and hung around afterwards. Hopefully the momentum will build for 6 Points, which which got off to a great start and thoroughly impressed us.