American Indie Goes to Monolith: Day Two

So, yesterday(ish), we presented you with an overview of a few of our favorite bands who will be performing at this year’s Monolith Festival on day one. As you probably already know (or for the lazy and uninformed), The fest takes place in Denver, CO over two days (September 12 and 13) at Red Rocks and features an incredible lineup of performances. We know that a lot of you are planning to be there, and since we like to do your work for you, here are some our favorite bands who will be performing on day two:

MSTRKRFT. What? I love electronic music. Coincidentally, I tend to like a lot of the music that comes out of Canada, too, and these guys happen to be from Toronto. Self described as Electro/Punk/Rap, MSTRKRFT makes music with a beat you can dance to. My favorite songs are the disco era throwback “Heartbreaker”, featuring John Legend, and the driving, uptempo “Fist of God”. They’ve remixed songs for a lot of great bands, from Juliette and the Licks, to Metric, to (my favorite) Bloc Party, so go. Dance. Experience MSTRKRFT.

The Dandy Warhols. Portland indie rock royalty, The Dandy Warhols have been around since 1995; even if you don’t really know their music, you’ve at least heard “Bohemian Like You” (especially if you’re a Buffy fan – the song is on the Radio Sunnydale album). Front man Courtney Taylor-Taylor describes the band’s beginning as a group of friends who “needed music to drink to.” It’s rock ‘n roll. Americana. Good stuff.

The Thermals. I confess that I really like most of the bands on Kill Rock Stars and Sub Pop Records. The Thermals are another Portland Post-Pop-Punk band, and they were sort of discovered by golden god Ben Gibbard in 2002. They’ve been termed a power trio (if you want to know a whole lot more about them, you can always read their Sub Pop bio), and easily live up to the name. They split from Sub Pop early this year and signed with Kill Rock Stars, then released their fourth album, Now We Can See, which was was recorded by the iconic John Congleton (Explosions in the Sky, Polyphonic Spree). They are essentially the definition of an indie rock band, and we think you’ll enjoy them.

The Twilight Sad. An indie rock band from Kilsyth, Scotland, The Twilight sad are James Graham (vocals), Andy MacFarlane (guitar, accordion), Craig Orzel (bass, glockenspiel) and Mark Devine (drums). The band’s debut album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, was released on FatCat Records in 2007, drawing widespread critical acclaim. Yeah, we totally yanked that from Wikipedia, because what we knew about them until recently was limited to the fact that they’re on tour with Frightened Rabbit (who we told you about yesterday) and We Were Promised Jetpacks (who we’ll tell you about in a minute). What we’ve learned since then, is that they’re kind of amazing, with “grand, stirring, emotionally-wrought guitar-rock sung in brogues of varying thickness.”[*] Long story short; we have a new favorite, and so should you.

We Were Promised Jetpacks. Clearly, we like the Scottish. Three out of our ten featured Monolith bands are from Scotland (these guys hail from Glasgow). We Were Promised Jetpacks are pretty new, so if you jump on the bandwagon now, you can say that you’ve liked them, omg, forever. The band’s debut album, These Four Walls, was just released on June 15 of this year. Simply put, they are amazing. “I love the charging guitars, the soaring choruses, the sheer ENERGY that they’ve got going on. It makes me want to drown in their music. Their wall of guitars sounds like a massive torrent of rain – covering every part of your being, drenching you to the core in their atmospheric wall of noise.” Yeah. What he said.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our small but mighty preview of Monolith Festival 2009. The ten bands that we’ve covered over the past couple of days really reflect the best of Monolith (if we do humbly say so ourselves), so we hope you’ll go and check them out. You can see the entire lineup for both days here, and for a little history, take a look at the Wiki.