CONTEST: Cloud Cult totally wants to party with you at Monolith like the VIP rockstar you are

The denizens of Colorado and surrounding states are gearing up this weekend for the second annual Monolith Festival. The party kicks off Friday night with a headlining show from indie chamber-pop collective Cloud Cult, along with Young Coyotes and The Dutchess and The Duke.

Because they love you, Cloud Cult has given Fuel/Friends one VIP pass to the entire Monolith weekend for a lucky reader to win!

So this VIP pass gets ya:
- into both days of the fest
- premium reserved soundboard seating
- VIP Parking in Red Rocks upper North parking lot
- access to Monolith VIP Lounge w/ private bar
- Monolith 2008 limited edition CD sampler & poster
- access to Exclusive VIP Afterparty 9/13/08 at Red Rocks with special performances from The Hood Internet, Passion Pit, White Williams, Candy Coated Killahz, Boyhollow, and Jackola
- limited edition Monolith Eco-Tote Bag from Trek Light Gear
- unlimited use of the Oxygen Bar in the Red Rocks Underground (weak out-of-towners!)

Cloud Cult has been making sweepingly gorgeous, thoughtfully incisive music since 1995, and their most recent album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-partying Through Tornadoes) is out now on Earthology Records. The winner of the contest will also get a copy of the album. Seeing them Friday will be my first experience face-to-face with the group (I missed their second-stage headlining set at Monolith last year for reasons we don’t remember).

What do I have to look forward to? “[A band of six] waving their stringed instruments about while wailing in unison in support of the lead singer. Songs that give you goosebumps, and shows that make you happy to be alive and breathing air and listening to music that is played with the same kind of passion that it was written with.”

Okay, yes. I’m in. I also hear that they paint live artwork on stage at their shows, shaped by the music, and that’s just beautiful.

Everybody Here Is A Cloud – Cloud Cult

TO ENTER THE VIP PASS CONTEST: EMAIL ME WITH “MONOLITH/CLOUD CULT” IN THE SUBJECT HEADER. I will pick one random winner from all entries received by Thursday at 9pm. You may also want to include your phone number in the email.

Please note — obviously if you want to win this you have to either be in the general Colorado area or be able to get yourself here by Friday (or Saturday morning). The pass will get you into all the festivities starting Friday night at the Bluebird. The contest will end in t-minus 24 hours.

Cloud Cult will also play tomorrow (Thursday, 9/11) at 11:30am for 600 kids at Cerebral Palsy of Colorado during the Monolith Festival Reforestation Project, then at the Aggie in Fort Collins tomorrow night. Aaaand they’re also on Carson Daly tomorrow if you are sitting at home.

* Final caveat: Cloud Cult may not actually want to party with you, per se, but the part about you being a VIP rockstar is totally true.

[top photo credit Scott West, live photo credit Laurie Scavo]

Last night :: The Faint and the sweaty, sweaty kids at the Ogden Theatre

Last night at The Faint was a hot show in every sense of the word. It was frenzied and frantic, all sweaty moshing all-ages and pulsing, pounding, electronic/new-wave indie rock. I needed that.

All my pictures are up on Facebook, shot tentatively on my handy dandy new Canon Rebel XTi, a humblingly-tremendous early birthday present from my family. Watch out! I plan on having fun with this thing.

I Disappear – The Faint

CONTEST UPDATE: The new album also came out yesterday, and the randomly selected winner of The Faint vinyl contest is Josh — Josh, let me know where to have it sent!

The Faint fasciinate (and you can win the vinyl)

[they brought back the Soul Coughing guy from retirement!]

On August 5th, Nebraska dance-punk band The Faint will return with a new self-released album, Fasciinatiion (on their own blank.wav label). They’ll be kicking off a tour in support of it, and I’m looking forward to catching them towards the opening end at Denver’s Ogden Theatre on Tuesday night, for what is sure to be a rad show.

I’ve not seen The Faint in concert before but friends who’ve gone cite the live action as simultaneously a huge amount of fun with perhaps a thread of dark fear running through it (stay out of the daylight!). This is not a bad combination, but hopefully the ratio of fun to fear will be proportionately higher than that time I saw Marilyn Manson in 1995 at now-defunct Edge nightclub in Palo Alto — still scarred from that one. Anyways . . . I woefully digress.

NEW CONTEST! Thanks to the folks at blank.wav, I have one double gatefold 180-gram vinyl of the new album Fasciinatiion to give away to one lucky winner. Please leave a comment if you’d like to win — and if you’ve seen ‘em live, tell me what I have in store for me. Posed to death!

Fasciinatiion Track List:
1) Get Seduced
2) The Geeks Were Right
3) Machine in the Ghost
4) Fulcrum and Lever
5) Psycho
6) Mirror Error
7) I Treat You Wrong
8) Forever Growing Centipedes
9) Fish in a Womb
10) A Battle Hymn for Children

The Geeks Were Right – The Faint

And the tour starts tomorrow night, rocking Des Moines:

THE FAINT TOUR DATES
July 27 Des Moines, IA – Peoples Court
July 28 Sioux Falls, SD – Ramkota Annex
July 29 Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre
July 30 Salt Lake City, UT – In the Venue
July 31 Boise, ID – Big Easy Boise
Aug 01 Vancouver, British Columbia – Commodore
Aug 02 Seattle, WA – Showbox at the Market
Aug 03 Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom
Aug 04 San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
Aug 05 San Francisco, CA – Grand Ballroom
Aug 07 Los Angeles, CA – Henry Fonda Theatre
Aug 08 Los Angeles, CA – Henry Fonda Theatre
Aug 09 San Diego, CA – Soma
Aug 11 Austin, TX – La Zona Rosa
Aug 12 Dallas, TX – Palladium
Aug 14 Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse
Aug 15 Carrboro, NC – Cats Cradle
Aug 16 Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
Aug 17 Philadelphia, PA – Trocadero
Aug 18 New York, NY – Terminal 5
Aug 20 Worcester, MA – Palladium
Aug 21 Toronto, Ontario – Opera House
Aug 22 Chicago, IL – Vic Theatre
Aug 23 Omaha, NE – Sokol Auditorium

Hold Steady contest winners

The Hold Steady‘s new album Stay Positive is out today on Vagrant Records, and the randomly-selected winners of the contest are as follows:

STAY POSITIVE CD
Cousin Walt
The Blot
Ryan

STAY POSITIVE VINYL
Benjamin K.
Miles in Denver (hi neighbor!)

If you are a winner, please let me know where to have the good folks at Vagrant send your musical winnings. Thanks for all the amazing entries; what a breathtaking lyrical pool we have to select from.

The Hold Steady / Stay Positive: “Let’s clutch and kiss and sing and shake, tonight let’s try to levitate”

“Back then it was beautiful
The boys were sweet and musical
The laser lights looked mystical
. . . Messed up still felt magical“

The more I listen to The Hold Steady, the more I think they might have what it takes to save rock & roll from crushing heartlessness, unoriginal pallor, and detached apathy. You might have noticed that people tend to fall diametrically on one side or the other of the Hold Steady spectrum. My friend Barber once described lead singer Craig Finn as “a crazy inebriated prophet, ear tuned to the roar, shouting out real-life scripture over the ocean of noise of society or a really loud bar band.” Yet I have other friends who violently object to the whole concept whenever I broach it. The Hold Steady must be something you either get –and get hard– or don’t. On this new album especially, I find it difficult to understand the latter.

On their fourth studio album Stay Positive (which drops in physical form July 15th) these five guys from Minneapolis stretch their songwriting out down new roads, and as always everything feels pretty epic and massive. Pressed up against gorgeously grand and subversively hopeful songs, Finn weaves complex stories of lust and confusion, of cutting and car crashes, of oracles and angels.

You can get an accurate impression of the feelings contained on Stay Positive from the cover and superb inner album art. Despite the muddy ground and the nauseatingly yellow sky with all the color bled out, there is always the potential for something exciting to happen tonight, for some urgency to swoop down and make you feel alive for forty-five minutes. The feeling of continuity that connects all of the Hold Steady’s albums is present here, through serial characters like Holly –who has been in the hospital, shaky but still trying to shake it, and now the girl who won’t say hi to him– and also through recurrent themes that perennially crop up to make a Hold Steady song what it is. The landscape is desolate, but the kids in the songs still yearn.

Stay Positive is also their album of bleeding and miracles — a fitting dichotomy for a band that plumbs both the gritty violent parts of our psyche as well as the redemption. On one of the album’s strongest tracks, Finn calls a girl named Sapphire (who possesses some hallucinogenic visionary abilities) and begs, “I know you said don’t call until I’m clean . . . but I’m not drunk, I’m cut. I’m gushing blood, and I need someone to come and pick me up.” I find something in the desperation of how Finn wrenches and pleads out that line that reverberates throughout the album. There’s talk of crucifixion, visions, and miracles, and later he sings “Don’t mention bloodshed, don’t tell them it hurts, don’t say we saw angels, they’ll take us straight to the church.” Make no mistake, this is an album of the mud and the blood and the beer, but along with that comes some old-fashioned revival-style hallelujah.

Musically, Stay Positive is as richly dense as anything they’ve done. I always find a sort of deliverance in the crashing piano cadences and expansive guitar solos of the Hold Steady, even as the lyrics detail another sad night, another desperate move. J Mascis guests stars (playing banjo on “Both Crosses”), as do Ben Nichols of Lucero and Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers (on backing vocals in a few songs). This is an album I am obviously enjoying immensely through the throes of this sweltering summer.

LISTEN: Sequestered In Memphis & Lord I’m Discouraged (stream)

NEW CONTEST: Thanks to the good folks at Vagrant, I have Hold Steady largess to scatter upon ye lucky masses like manna from the heavens.

Three lucky winners will win the Stay Positive CD (with the 3 bonus tracks on it, I think) and two of you will be spinning the black circle with the vinyl LP. The vinyl is 160 gram (black color), gatefold, and will feature one bonus track “Ask Her For The Adderall.”

Please leave me a comment indicating which format you are entering for, and since there are so many good ones to choose from, let’s talk about favorite Hold Steady lyrics.

Walk away with these lines from the new album — they leave you with that ache:

“Girls didn’t seem so difficult
Boys didn’t seem so typical
It was all warm and white and wonderful
We were all invincible

We were wasps with new wings
Now we’re bugs in the jar
We were hot soft and pure
Now we’re scratched up in scars.“

POSTSCRIPT OF OLD CONTEST BUSINESS: The Joe Strummer prize pack garnered some of the very best comments yet left on Fuel/Friends. From lighting Joe’s cigarette (a tale I verified with the cool commenter – oh, to have a lighter just when Joe Strummer fumbles for one outside a Vegas hotel) to talking to him backstage, wracked with nervous anticipation, you gotta go read all the great tales. Because I’m soft, I went with a randomly-selected winner: James from Brooklyn. Congrats! Let me know where to send it.

The future is unwritten (I think he might have been our only decent teacher)

“No one struggled more manfully with the gap between the myth and the reality of being a spokesman for your generation than Joe Strummer. Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers. Instead, the incendiary lyrics of the Clash inspired 1,000 more bands on both sides of the Atlantic to spring up and challenge their elders – and the man that we all looked to was Joe Strummer.”

– Billy Bragg eulogy to Joe Strummer, Dec. 23, 2002

The 2007 documentary by English filmmaker Julien Temple on the life of Clash frontman Joe Strummer will be released to DVD on July 8th. In The Future Is Unwritten, Temple (who knew Strummer for 30+ years) follows the path from his formative years in groups like The 101ers, to “the only band that mattered,” and then into his solo career and the legacy he left at his untimely death.

Keys To Your Heart – The 101ers (early Joe Strummer band)

NEW CONTEST: Fuel/Friends has a package deal of the DVD and the CD soundtrack to give away to one of y’all. Leave me a comment telling me something you love about Joe Strummer — a lyric, a story, a song, a quote, you pick. One winner will be randomly selected in a week.

TRAILER:

This cover isn’t on the soundtrack, but . . . I love it:

Redemption Song – Joe Strummer & Johnny Cash

Also, thanks to Cara for bringing this on my radar. Do jet over to Scatter o Light to check out the cool Bono/Strummer song she has, one of the last songs Joe worked on before his death.

WRAP-UP: Speaking of contests, we’ve got this old business: the Brushfire Record vinyl sampler winners are readers Scott Orr and frankie dartz. Please provide me your mailing addresses and I’ll get these babies in the mail with a smiley little note just for you.

Neil Halstead and a new vinyl giveway from Brushfire Records

British musician Neil Halstead has produced some lovely, starry-night music in his years of tunes; with Slowdive, with Mojave 3, and solo. The first time I probably heard him was on a surf movie soundtrack, or something that conjures up a sparkling ocean in my mind. It’s gorgeous, melancholy, sleepwalking music with a strong support of melody holding it up from slogging around in the dreamland.

This song is the first listen from his forthcoming Oh! Mighty Engine album (out July 29th on Brushfire). He sings, “I just want to live somewhere where the air is sweet and clear,” and this sounds like it will be the perfect accompaniment when he does get there.

Paint A Face – Neil Halstead

This song is also the lead-off track on the newest contest item I have for your winning: Brushfire has supplied me with two 12″ vinyl samplers left from the festivities of Record Store Day. It features eight songs from their artist roster –

12″ TRACKLISTING
Neil Halstead – Paint A Face
Mason Jennings – Something About Your Love
Jack Johnson – What You Thought You Need
Matt Costa – Never Looking Back
Money Mark – Summer Blue
G. Love and Special Sauce – Crumble (from the new album Superhero Brother, out yesterday)
Zach Gill (of ALO) – Beautiful Reason (from unreleased new album Stuff, out July 29)
Christians In Black – Rogue Wave

Not a bad selection, there. I’ve got two to give away, leave me a comment if you would like to be entered for one of ‘em. You can also buy the vinyl here if you don’t win it. Neil Halstead will be the opening act for labelmate Jack Johnson in August from Toronto to Salt Lake, and then will be announcing a West Coast headlining tour soon.

Contest winner updates: Monolith and Indy

I had so many intriguing options to choose from in my contest to give away two Monolith weekend passes. To differentiate the contest entries from the rest of my emails I get in a day, I asked folks to consider using the title, “Hey Heather, I Want To Buy You A Beer At Monolith.” I got those, and more.

There were the offers to buy me a beer, buy me several beers, buy me an unspecified mind-altering substance, buy me an overpriced hot dog, and do a kegstand. The latter two may be better suited for other venues, but we can try. The randomly-selected winners of the Monolith passes are Cass (from Wyoming!) and Jill (from Austin, TX!). Thanks to all who played, and I sincerely hope all the entrants will still come to the fest — and make good on their promises to me. It should be a fantastic weekend.

ALSO, the Indiana Jones soundtrack contest winner is Pete, with his citation of the excellent quote, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” Sigh.

Indiana wants me

I was up late last night after watching the Rockies sadly best the Giants at Coors Field in Denver (that bottom of the sixth was a bitch). So if I weren’t already working on a growing sleep deficit from this weekend, I’d be seriously considering going to the theaters at midnight tomorrow to see the new Indiana Jones (actually, I still might). I’ve been awaiting this new installment — I adore everything about those movies, and have even forgiven the Temple of Doom for scaring the bejesus out of me at a sleepover when I was 9 or 10. Ripping a guy’s beating heart out of his chest cavity may frighten children. Good to know.

Ever since the previews for the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull started airing, I’ve pretty much been walking around humming this when I need to feel especially victorious. If I had a personal theme song, this would kind of be in the running because then I’d feel awesome all the time.

CONTEST: The soundtrack for the movie is released today, featuring an original score composed by Academy Award winner John Williams. Fuel/Friends has one copy to give away if movie soundtracks are your thing, or if you just have a crush on Harrison Ford. Leave me a comment about some element of one of the Indiana Jones movies that you wanna write a comment about — a quote, a moment, the time when that dude literally melts and turns into dust because of God’s wrath, etc. etc. You choose.

And since I have no mp3 from the soundtrack, this song works very very well. A girl can dream.

Indiana Wants Me – R. Dean Taylor

PS – I so just added him as a friend on MySpace

New Monolith acts announced and a new contest :: Win a weekend pass to the festival!

News this fine Monday morning from the craggy hills of Red Rocks — the 2008 Monolith Festival just added twenty-two hot new acts to an already airtight lineup.

New Monolith additions include:
Atmosphere, Hercules and Love Affair, Foals, Does it Offend You, Yeah? Port O’Brien, Pomegranates, Colour Revolt, KaiserCartel, Candy Coated Killahz, Jukebox the Ghost, American Bang, The Chain Gang of 1974, Joshua Novak, Erin Ivey, The Wheel, Paperbird, Noah Harris, Lynsey Smith, Scratch Track, David Moore, LoveLikeFire, and Dave Beegle.

Add these to the complete listing that will now be rockin the ‘Rado on September 13th and 14th.

Now each of us Hot Freaks partner blogs is getting a chance to give away some passes to the festival, in addition to our work in helping curate the lineup! So I’ve got a new contest that starts today and runs for ONE WEEK (til May 26).

Two lucky Fuel/Friends readers will each win a weekend pass for the Monolith 2008 Festival (a $110 value)! To enter, you must do a little clickety-click research and find out what the original purchase price of the Red Rocks land cost the city of Denver back in 1927.

EMAIL ME your answer with a subject line of “Hey Heather, I Wanna Buy You A Beer At Monolith” (or something to that effect, that’d be grand). Don’t leave it in the comments, please, or you’ll wreck the whole illustrious trivia vision.

I’ll pick two readers randomly from all the correct answers received. For those that won’t get the passes (but you’re all winners in my book), tickets are onsale now.

One band added to the lineup today is Sub Pop-signed Oxford art school dropouts the Foals, who we’ve mentioned before because they get us movin. One of the Monolith organizers DJ Hot To Death (I call him Fecher) worked up a special remix of the Foals song “Electric Bloom” in honor of the occasion today. The world premiere:

Electric Bloom (Hot To Death remix) – The Foals