The wet, wet glory of Monolith 2009 (come see what we saw)

The third annual Monolith Festival took over scenic Red Rocks in Colorado last weekend, with one of the most pleasantly-varied assortment of music yet, and I found much to entertain my ears. Perhaps I was more motivated this year than last, but despite the rain Saturday and drizzles on Sunday, I constantly found myself making tough choices between acts slotted simultaneously that I wanted to see. It’s good to have more than enough choices at a festival, running back and forth to catch the next buzzed-about act — and I certainly did at Monolith this year, along with lots of other folks.

Having just come from the massively spread-out Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, I was struck by how small and intimate this festival still feels. Despite being packed in with several thousand of my closest concert-going friends of the Western States region, Monolith still felt like a boutique arrangement, with five stages squeezed into the rather compact natural park. I got to see some terrific folks.

Let’s start with a nice assortment of three videos I shot, showing why this is a marvelous festival:

Anni Rossi – “West Coast”

Rahzel – Beatboxing to “Seven Nation Army” and “Sexy Back”
(White Stripes and Justin Timberlake covers)

Monotonix, not yet showing his hairy buttcrack.

The diversity of artists this year was terrific. From discovering a new singer-songwriter with clever lyrics and gorgeous viola-playing skills (like Chicago’s Anni Rossi, who reminded me of Regina Spektor with strings), to clapping and hooting along while Rahzel (from The Roots) beatboxed his way through some wickedly enjoyable covers (that’s me laughing on the video when he announces “Remix!” and then does just that), to the roiling crowd response to Tel Aviv punk/rocker/remover-of-clothes Monotonix (who performed most of his set on the shoulders of the audience, and pulled his terrycloth shorts off in glee), Monolith kept me hopping (and climbing).

LISTEN to how I fell in love:
West Coast – Anni Rossi

Concert-companion Dainon and I are gonna tell you about a few other loves we each experienced during the weekend. One that we both agreed on is The Features from Tennessee, recently signed to Kings of Leon’s 429 Records, and one of the absolute best live shows I’ve seen in a long time: propulsive, melodic, catchy rock with a winning wail. I told the Facebook during the set that I thought I’d just bruised my thighs with the force of my leg-drumming. Their set meandered from awkward-punk-pop songs about falling in love on a Thursday to blistering rockers like this one:

Dainon says: True to the name they’ve attached to their music, The Features ought to really be featured on your radios, car stereos, and subconscious. Add one tiny, bearded man-wail to some of the loudest feeling music in all of Monolith (they filled up alla that wide open, Red-Rocked empty space) and you’re left with a band that demands you stay with them as they go about propelling themselves forward. Onward and up and through the hoops that should make ‘em famous. Prediction? They’ll be big. The band will overcome their height. The Features make you proud to be a lover of music. They’re a budding secret that needs passing on.

Thursday – The Features

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes were definitely the most visually and kinetically stimulating band I had the pleasure of getting up close and personal with all weekend. I’m not sure I’d listen often to their utopian fantasy music that belongs frolicking wildly in a peyote-induced dream somewhere, for sure, but this band (fronted by a man not named Edward Sharpe, like whoa) wowed me with their obvious joy.

Dainon says: Cotton Jones looks like a bunch of guys had just stumbled in from a sleepy, fishing town (after a long hard day of the deep-sea fishing even) and decided to try their hand at some sangin. This is the beautiful stuff, the kind that sounded best on that darkened stage with those red lights—ambiance was on their side. This is the performance that invited the festival audience to catch its breath before stumbling on to the next. It was as invited as it was needed. In this world, flannel was spoken and razors were ignored. In this place, love is whispered through sidelong glances, key tickling and warm-on-a-rainy-day songs.

I (Heather) love this song even more after seeing it shimmer and slowly coalesce live:

Blood Red Sentimental Blues – Cotton Jones

“I just thought I’d tell ya, all the demons have been slain / there’s no need for hesitation, honey I been re-arranged…”

Denver’s Natural Selection at the opening night party was more fun to dance to than Chromeo’s shiny DJ set, for sure. I love basslines that make my chest vibrate and my teeth rattle in my head while I shake my hips. That sounds like some sort of torture method as I read that sentence back but trust me, it is fun. This bi-city band (Denver + St Louis, somehow) is a “funk-disco attack” of the finest variety — and appears to have a required uniform of a) awesome denim mini-cutoffs b) gold pants and a vest, no shirt or c) neon. Totally works for me.

Dainon says: The Grates are a happier, skippier take on that early No Doubt action, whether you choose to squint your eyes and go about seeing Gwen in its lead singer or not. There’s a sailor suit here, lots and lots of skipping and a smile so bright, your heart has no choice but to go boom (read into that whatever you choose to). She even took time to tell us about her having farted about 100 times since she’d got there on account of that crazy CO altitude. What’s more? It was endearing. Then again, what isn’t in an Australian accent? All’s I know is I wanted a hug when it was all over, if just to transfer some of that pixie-tastic energy over my way. For a good time, pick up either of their two albums. For a better one, go to a show and give the singer a shoulder ride when she asks for one, because she will. She so will.

I mused out loud during M. Ward‘s dense and gorgeously-rocking set that I seem to forget how much I adore his music. This was the first time I had seen him live solo (once with She in SF), and I decided during his set that a) Post-War is probably on my list of top ten albums from this decade that I will continue to listen to for years and years to come and b) his catalog really expands and becomes much more raggedly rocking in concert, in a very very good way. I was also transfixed by his anachronistic peculiarness, which reminded me of a traveling salesman+blues musician from the 1930s or something, one that truly knows his way with a guitar. He’s so interesting to watch, and completely his own.

Dainon says: There’s a weird energy that accompanies Of Montreal and its stage show, though it never fails to puzzle me. I can’t make sense of what’s going on, though I try so earnestly to do so, every single damn time even. Still, if you can manage to get past the tiger-headed humans, the half-naked men, the munching on genitalia, the leotards, the sparkling blue eye makeup and the feather boas, well then, Of Montreal treats you right. They’ve a show to go with their story to go with their music. As in they’ve got groove in their respective hearts. Is it Prince light, as goes the rampant accusation? Maybe. One thing’s for certain … the band’s avid followers will make the floor shake every single time, even if it is made of heavy rock. Boogie yer two shoes, indeed.

All my pics –and more commentary– are over on Facebook, if you’d like to see the rest of what we did and how we barely survived (spoiler: Dainon had a run-in with a drag queen, I got my lip caught in a can while shotgunning a beer). It was a long, pretty rad weekend:

Opening Night & Saturday
Sunday

And here’s a few more, just because there was so much to see. Next year, you should come.

CHROMEO (video: “Tenderoni“)

DEER TICK

GIRL TALK

PHOENIX
(what album cover does that remind me of?!?)

YEAH YEAH YEAHS

Riffing on Sasquatch

Fuel/Friends’ good friend Dainon from Utah went to Sasquatch Festival in Washington with my neighbor from across the street in Colorado. Go figure. I stayed home — but he reflects on his weekend well-spent in a special guest post.

Riffing on Sasquatch
by Dainon Moody

There’s a difference between the casual concertgoer and someone who attends a music festival. Well, several, in fact. Here’s a start. One’s looking for something to bump and grind to on a Friday night. The other has to plan for cheap airline tickets, a steady diet of free Beef Jerky samples and dried cherries for three days, carpooling in the back seat of a cramped Jetta for five hours in a row, overzealous country cops, 82 degree sunshine without the shade and, on top of that big pile o’ goo, which bands to see and which to leave far behind because, let’s face it, you just can’t see them all, no matter how hard you try to manage it.

I’ll go ahead and allow you to decide which is which.

See, the festivalgoer is not unlike a bird watcher in his or her dedication. I mean no offense to those who watch birds. I know little of the sport. I can chalk up my entire bird watching experience to seeing Blue Jays run smack into my grandma’s big Missouri sliding glass door time after time after mostly hilarious time. But, stay with me on this. There’s a real commitment involved in festivals. This is the hobby we have chosen. And there are parallels to consider. We may not be able to manage very believable whippoorwill birdcalls, but we’ll scream our lungs raw in appreciation when the guitar solo hits our ears right. We may not use binoculars to seek out whether or not, say, there are black speckles on a robin’s breast, but we’ll bone up on reviews and listen to your band’s songs weeks ahead of time in hopes of identifying one in your band’s onslaught of the hopefully familiar.

There’s more. We’ll take a barrage of photos of you as you perform, no matter how far away we are, no matter how dark it is; we never give up hope for the one blessed unblurred shot. And, if we’re really lucky, we’ll try to take them with us included and we’ll act as casual as we can manage standing next to you (with varying results, sure). We’ll even go about attempting to grab video of the songs in your catalog that we really, really like, avoiding the sing-a-longers standing nearby and pretending as much as we can that we don’t have shaky hands in the process. It all adds up to dedication. Let’s face it—in another line of work, we’d make for excellent peeping toms. As it stands, we’re simply superfans. We might even take a bullet for you if you catch us on the right day.

The ironic part of this is that, while we do have to commit to a lot and plan like crazy, we never have to commit to a band for very long once we get there. This definitely speaks to the single kids, as well as those adults who can’t make a decision to save our lives. If you’re not as good live as you are on CD (I’m looking at you, Passion Pit), we’ll know in a song or two. We don’t need to stick with you an hour. We can wander off to a new discovery or to a more tested-and-true kinda musicality. TV On The Radio and Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver win our devotion, easy. Santigold in the sunshine? The Gaslight Anthem doing a Pearl Jam cover, from the Singles soundtrack no less? We’ll stick around for gems like that. Nine Inch Nails? Eh, not so much. Hey, it is what it is.

Sadly, not everyone goes for the music at a festival. About half of the guesstimated 75,000 attendees at Sasquatch were using the music as a soundtrack to their $9 beer dranking and hours-long naps and apple bonging (it’s exactly what you think it is). Sometimes they were ingenious enough to sneak alcohol into the festival inside a flask shaped like binoculars or a hollowed-out loaf of bread even. Some just wanted to draw magic marker tats on one another. And still others were just around to see exactly how many sloppy, slobbery kisses and such they could get away with in the midst of wide-eyed onlookers (and it was a whole, whole lot, it really was). The rest of us? We were the bird watchers. We were the grizzled prospectors. We were sifting through the gravel, picking diamonds out of the rough stuff. We sought and found.

I can only speak for these eyes and these ears. For the curious, here’s a smattering of my findings.

_________________________

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele out of Mississippi? Both a surprise and a revelation. He was like Jens Lekman with an even better sense of humor. Maybe Elvis Costello with more of the boogie woogie infused into his tunes? The glasses and slicked hair cast him as a total geek of a guy, but he found my smiles. I mean, he had background singers manipulating the female doowop sound! He had a ukulele and he knew how to use it! One song was so good, you just wanted to hear what would come next. And then the next after that. It was easy to buy that album. It was one of the easiest sells I can recall.

The Decemberists? Need to buy the new album, pronto. Passion Pit? Need to listen to the album instead of the concert.

M. Ward was solid as a rock, he was. He’s a real pro at what it is he does. He knew he only had an hour to give us a show, so he took just seconds between songs, barreling from one to another so quickly, his set was just a cough away from being one long, beautiful melody. It pains me to write it, but Zooey wasn’t much needed.

It was good to fight for the spot that allowed us to see Bon Iver from just 20 feet away. It’s just unreal how good Justin Vernon sounds live, but he does. He just does. Whether he’s doing songs from his first album, the new EP or even throwing in a Kathleen Edwards cover to appease the pot smokers, he’s on top of his game. I think he knows it. There were sound snafus and it didn’t much matter in the end. He saw past them and showed his stripes. Hearing and watching his little crew do “Creature Fear” with enough ferocity to break his strings at the end of it all? That sealed the deal for me. That set opened me wide and made me a bigger fan than I already was.

VIDEO: Bon Iver at Sasquatch, w/ Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond – “Flume”

Heartless Bastards? I just love you. The Dutchess & The Duke? Thank you so, so much. Grizzly Bear? You done did what I thought you’d do. That band needs a bigger hug from the public, sure, and maybe it’ll happen with the new album. But you can get lost inside their harmonies pretty easily. It’s exactly what the band wants, too, so just let it happen.

There were more, but that ought to do, right? I’m running a bit long as it stands.

Biggest regret? Missing the Builders & The Butchers out of Portland. Scamper away and take them in because you’ll hear something just fantastic in them. Believe it. And The School of Seven Bells! Why’d you have to play while The Avett Brothers were? You intrigue me, but the Avetts stole my heart out from under me. I hope they make and sing their solid brand of country songs for the rest of the years I am alive. Then—and only then—will it be enough.

VIDEO: Avett Brothers @ Sasquatch – “Murder In The City”

You can only take so much festival. Sometimes two-and-a-half days’ worth is your breaking point. And you know it means missing Girl Talk and Explosions in the Sky and Erykah Badu but, you know what? You put your arm around Annie from St. Vincent. You left with an autographed copy of Grizzly Bear’s latest. You saw the lead singer of Monotonix perform so hard, he earned a flesh wound for his art … and, despite the blood coming out of his head, kept on going. You heard enough songs and saw enough good, solid bands to last you, what, a good month or two? Perhaps.

VIDEO: Monotonix drumming in the Sasquatch crowd

The mind wants more, maybe, and the miser in you wants to get the most out of what was a gifted ticket anyway (it’s the principle of the thing!), but there’s a time to retreat to your own bed, stop loving on the perfect 80 degree sunshine and give Sasquatch a kiss on the mouth goodbye. It was good, so crazy good, but goodbyes are inevitable. You can only take so much.

Still. Thanks, Sasquatch. I’ll remember you well.