They made the stage area at Red Rocks a lot of hard work to get to for a reason. When a band plays there for the first time, it has to feel like as if it’s arrived, and after the steep climb from the parking lot, you should too.

It beats the hell out of me why it’s taken as long as it has to get a festival with an underground/indie rock mindset staged at this natural location; there are sure a lot of less likely places that have them. I’m not going to expose myself here by saying that Denver doesn’t have the kind of music scene that Austin or Seattle or, um, Australia has. That might have been the case ten years ago, but anyone who’s been living in that city recently or in Boulder or Colorado Springs or Fort Collins and paying attention could tell you that Colorado has a richly eclectic music scene only now beginning to self-assess and realize it rivals that of any other midsize city in the country.

Perhaps Denver couldn’t get its own festival until this exact moment, when the metro area finally has enough good bands to make up half the spots on the bill and totally deserve every one: Everything Absent or Distorted, Ian Cooke, and the Hot IQs were every bit as worth your attention as the bands from New York, California and the U.K. In at least one case, there was a local band for whom Monolith was a step backwards: Born in the Flood, as I heard it, destroyed their instruments after their set in frustration with having been shoved to an out-of-the-way side stage only weeks after commanding the big one as openers for The Fray. Whether it was the more casual music fans suddenly looking around and sheepishly realizing great music had been incubating right in their own backyards for years or out-of-town bands like Ghostland Observatory, The Decemberists, and Art Brut making the most out of the big stage, Monolith had a recurring theme of giving music that normally doesn’t get heard by a wide enough audience the chance to behave as if it ruled the world.

Besides the opportunity to see dozens of bands in an outdoor setting even a shut-in could appreciate, what was unique about Monolith was the swagger the Denver music scene suddenly assumed. Everywhere you turned there was somebody like Andy from CAT-A-TAC or Julie from Bela Karoli chilling out with sunglasses and an all-access pass, receiving well-wishers and acting as if they owned the place, which for at least two days the Denver scenesters did. No one was more struck by the significance of the moment than Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, who took pains during his band’s festival-closing set to make damn sure the filled-to-the-back audience left for the trek back to the parking lots full of the desire to make the community spirit radiate beyond the weekend.

Friday was the day of too many bands, too many stages, and too little time: If I had but the time to renumerate my guilt over all that I missed. Let’s be honest; what is great about a properly run festival (and Monolith was really a model of the form, in this sense as well as many others) is freedom of choice. No one is imposing their music on you. Just because a big crowd has formed in front of one side stage doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong choice sliding over to the well-hidden acoustic stage to form up with just a handful of other adventure-seekers. No one concertgoer’s experience is more valid than any other’s, so I will write merely about that which I saw and you will trust me that no assumptions positive or negative are being made about those bands I did not chance to see. I encourage the no doubt legion many of you moved by acts I never even considered to find your own venues to spread the word.

Everything Absent or Distorted were the first band scheduled to play on the main stage Friday, and accordingly they were the first band I heard as I strolled into Red Rocks that afternoon. I’ve written here and elsewhere about how much I admire the EAOD octet as musicians and people. Every time I see them live I return to their wonderful The Soft Civil War anew, curious as to which songs my favorites will be this time around. Their set on Friday could not have been more appropriate a palate-cleanser for Monolith due to the similarities between Everything Absent or Distorted and music festivals in general. Both are: colorful, festive, somewhat overpopulated, a little overwhelming at first, and far too large and unwieldy to ever come over as completely, 100% perfectionist-sense organized. For the occasion the group invited most of the rest of Denver’s musicians who weren’t already official members of the band up on stage with them. Who knows how much of the set was actually rehearsed, what was important in the context was enthusiasm, and the white-clad EAOD lads brought that (as do they always) with alacrity. I do not anticipate the day when all the members get full professorships in other states and their onstage celebrations of high-minded intellectual horseplay become less frequent. “The Exit Parade” always struck me as kind of an arena rock song. It should be played in more arenas ere its creators go off to become our cultural elite.

I’ve been a fan of Ian Cooke since the first time I saw him play in Boulder, but I wasn’t sure whether taking the time to see him at Monolith was justified. So many bands, so little time, you know. But since the acoustic stage was in close proximity to the main one (and didn’t involve a punishing hike up a sheer cliff face), I dropped in and ended up staying for his whole set. Cooke is obviously a virtuoso cellist and has perfected an eerie, mildly affected singing style that stretches out on vowel sounds like the vocal equivalent of a bowed note. Occasional use of a loop pedal aside, he creates with just his voice and instrument a sound that’s anything but minimal. Friday Cooke was in the best form I’ve seen him in, ad libbing in the midst of songs and interacting with the crowd. He threw a little musical allusion to “Master of Puppets” into one of his tunes and behind me a guy in a Pink Floyd T-shirt goggled and incredulously said, “Wait, who is this?”

Back on the main stage, Ghostland Observatory were working for the money. I knew nothing of them besides their name before the weekend, but few of the bands that I ended up seeing proved hungrier. The anticipation for their set was high: Hustling back from Ian Cooke, an Everything Absent or Distorted member spoke with awe as he confided that he had seen Ghostland’s Aaron Behrens backstage and he was wearing the tighest jeans ever seen. Musically resembling something like Iggy Pop fronting the Postal Service, for Ghostland Observatory’s set Thomas Turner wore a full-length wizard’s cape and Behrens roared through such that for not one moment did his beautiful plaited hair stay motionless. On the whole I’m a little skeptical about the movement to replace bands with laptops, but in Ghostland’s case the unconventional lineup is entirely beside the point. This a rock and roll band, balls out, and Behrens has studied and borrowed from the greats. Those with less of an Igster fixation than I might find them kind of obnoxious, but allow me to argue that Ghostland Observatory’s appeal extends beyond mere attitude. Thomas’s productions are giddily thudding and cheeky, and Behrens’ vocals and occasional syncopated chunks of rhythm guitar are both a lot more musical than they first appear. One of the best pleasant surprises of the festival, from this spectator’s perspective.

I next made the trek up the hill to see CAT-A-TAC, and this was where one of the downsides of Monolith first came into play. In order to fit as many bands on the bill as possible and yet still keep festivalgoers captive within a narrowly defined, easily policed area, two of the side stages were indoors at the Red Rocks visitors’ center. This could have worked had a little more thought gone into the scheduling, but a lot of the bands shoved onto the WOXY.com and Rock Room stages had bigger followings than the small spaces afforded space for and for an expansive dream-rock act like CAT-A-TAC in particular, the low ceilings were simply death on their sound. I only stayed for a couple of CAT-A-TAC’s songs and over the rest of the weekend, I largely avoided sets on the indoor stages. This contributed to my agonizing decisions to skip Nathan & Stephen and Born in the Flood and caused me to miss any number of other bands for which I might otherwise have at least dropped in for a song or two. However even the downer of not getting to clearly hear CAT-A-TAC led to a darling little community bonding moment: Upon encountering CAT-A-TAC bassist Connor sometime later in the visitors’ center restroom, we discussed how annoying it is as bass players that wearing earplugs only serves to make our own instruments even less audible while it’s all the noise being made by the other musicians that is causing our hearing loss in the first place.

Back downstairs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were one of the few bands I saw all weekend on the big stage that really didn’t do anything for me. Alec Ounsworth’s annoying Perry Farrell voice is the least of their problems. They don’t move around on stage anywhere near as much as their name and their herky-jerky songs suggest they ought to, and their musicianship is frankly subpar. Ghostland Observatory did a lot more interesting things with two musicians than CYHSY did with five. They either need to fully commit to the good-time indie-dance thing that Architecture in Helsinki does so well on their new record or spend more time fretting over the construction of their songs, which on the whole don’t do anywhere enough to distinguish themselves from each other. CYHSY exist in an uncomfortable space – they’re too big to be an underground phenomenon and they’re not a good enough band to not seem imposters among the company they kept at Monolith. They’re too proficient instrumentally to try and be a MySpace-era version of Beat Happening or Half Japanese, but they’re not proficient enough to be, you know, an actual good band, so we’ll see what happens with them. I would cry “hype,” but then I said the same thing about The Shins at first.

The idea of including a midshow hip-hop act to break up all of the middle-class white introspection was a solid one. For next year’s show, it would be excellent if the Monolith organizers could find some rappers who had been artistically relevant more recently than the early 1990s, but for an initial attempt Das EFX fit the bill quite nicely. Krazy Drayz and Skoob’s memories are both completely dashed from years of the good life, to the extent that both rappers mostly just as served as hype men to the recorded versions of their group’s dusty hits while performing at Monolith, but the rap live performance is a completely different animal from the rock show and that was the whole point of having them there. Did people lift one arm above their heads and pump them up and down lazily in time to the beat? Yes, people did. Success.

I’m a fan of bits and pieces of the first two Kings of Leon records, but I wasn’t entirely sure to what to expect from their live show. They were one of several bands on the bill that I might never have seen outside of a festival setting. For the most part all of these bands ended up winning me over, so that’s another kudos to the Monolith organizers. It didn’t hurt matters any that KoL played my two favorite songs of theirs, “Molly’s Chambers” and “The Bucket,” back-to-back right near the top of their set. It also didn’t hurt that Nathan Followill is the very image of the big rock band drummer, playing creative, varied, and booming figures with seemingly effortless ease. The Kings struck me as that rare buzz band that has absorbed the blows that come with a quick rise, considered in their wake whether they could justify their existence as a band, and are already working on converting fans over to the positive answer at which they’ve justifiably arrived. Nathan’s bandmates Caleb (lead vocals) and Matthew (guitar) don’t move around a lot on stage, but they don’t need to—Caleb has a weapon of a burnout’s drawl for a voice and Matthew is a superior lead player. Kings of Leon haven’t found the right production vibe for their records as of yet. Youth and Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak unnecessarily cloaked the band in Strokes-like retro-ironist murk and Because of the Times is a messy, overthought kitchen sink-album, like Modest Mouse’s Moon & Antarctica only without the tension-relieving gag numbers. But songwriting was not the issue there as I once thought it was. On stage, “Knocked Up,” “Camaro” and “My Party” all of a sudden bust out like the 70s radio anthems they were always supposed to be. I particularly admired the way the muscle-fuzz of brother Jared’s bass is an active melodic participant in the songs rather than merely serving as mass in the manner in which many other hard rock-esque acts arrange their compositions.

As the lower bowl was beginning to fill in, I risked leaving my prime seat location one more time to make it over to the acoustic stage for Bela Karoli. I’m a strong proponent of this deeply original Denver act, who always seem to be the forgotten lights of the local scene—since they’re not a band with a big bass rig or a Nick Andopolis-sized drumkit, they always end up getting shoved first on a five-band bill or on a tiny side stage at a festival about which few attendees have even heard. That’s not fair. They’re good enough to deserve a wider audience, with a vibe that bravely goes against the current of most performing “indie rock” bands and a strong, mysterious, feminine identity of the sort which every scene could stand some more. Performing as a trio with their usual percussionist off at the top of mountain doing his thing for Born in the Flood, the ladies of Bela Karoli proved that their ghostly beats and close harmonies translate just as well to the “festival side stage” setting as the “tiny little rock club” setting, although I must say that is about time for some new songs, girls.

The Decemberists were the next band to take the main stage and proved another pleasant surprise. While their albums have been growing art-school precious at an alarming rate (the tipping point was an entire EP based on the 11th-century Celtic Táin Bó Cuailnge myth), as a live band the Decemberists don’t do anything you wouldn’t expect to see at a rock show and they’re all the better for it. So what if Nate Query’s upright bass and Chris Funk’s electric bouzouki don’t really sound any different than a regular electric bass and 12-string guitar would? The Decemberists’ focus is (as it should be) on the songwriting and storytelling of Colin Meloy, who despite looking and dressing rather like Garrison Keillor proved Monolith’s strongest negative case yet that convincing rock and roll frontmen all have to fit the Mick Jagger/Jim Morrison archetype. Meloy was arresting singing “July, July” and touching singing “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)” and a surprisingly rousing stand-in for Bono while leading the crowd in an anti-Bush cheer during the insidiously clever “16 Military Wives.” For a guy who’s the sole credited composer on some of the fussiest records that have been released in the post-Neutral Milk Hotel era, Meloy was amazingly easygoing onstage. He didn’t even freak out when some technical problems temporarily silenced his guitar, he merely took the opportunity to do a lap around the front row of the audience while his band indulged in a skiffle version of “You Are My Sunshine.” I must say, it’s as touched as I have felt hearing that song since the Doctor and Seven of Nine sang it together on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Before Friday headliner Cake took the stage, I ventured once more upwards to take in a few songs from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I don’t know why I bothered. Clearly more time has been spent by that group lovingly stressing their leather jackets and locating the most excessive smoke machine manufacturer on the market than writing thoughtful and original songs. Drummer Nick Jago plays the precise same bland kick-snare pattern for every riff. When their bass player stepped up to sing lead on a song and his voice sounded identical to their guitarist’s, that’s when I knew it was time to give up and head back to the main seating area. Some defenders of the band in my Monolith entourage protested that B.R.M.C. were worthy of the benefit of the doubt because they were writing smart political songs long before Green Day made it commercially lucrative to do so again, but I stand by my initial assessment. If the point of the band was the message of their songs and not how cool the members look being in the band, then they ought to turn the bass and the kick drum down so that those messages could conceivably be heard.

Closing the evening was Cake. What can you say about Cake? They have been doing the exact same thing, right down to the graphic design of their album covers, since Motorcade of Generosity came out in 1994. At one time the band was home to multiple good songwriters (former guitarist Greg Brown wrote their first big hit, “The Distance”) but over time it’s turned into solely the vehicle for John McCrea’s specific and distinct obsessions. A guy like McCrea’s career is so drenched in sarcasm that whenever he makes what might be regarded as a sincere gesture, like in this example a better-than-you-would think Cake reimagining of Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” you have to scratch your head over what if anything was really meant by it. On the other hand it’s hard to argue with the quality of the narrow-in-range-but-not-boring catalog Cake has accumulated over the years. I found myself thinking at once that the band had not played any of the songs I had wished to hear and yet every one they did play was a good one. “Daria,” “Comfort Eagle,” (somewhat surprisingly) “Rock and Roll Lifestyle,” even “Stickshifts and Safetybelts” and a Buck Owens number to give their country leanings fair airing. Highly satisfactory, though not revelatory, as Cake have always been and presumably always will be.

I returned for Day Two with a sore back and an accordingly scaled-down list of performers to catch. The first thing I saw might well have been the best performance of all Saturday, Gomez’s Ian Ball playing solo with an electric guitar in the WOXY.com room. For fans of Gomez or newcomers, Ball was terribly interesting all by himself. He told great stories as means of introducing the songs from his forthcoming solo album. He played Gomez songs, some more or less as recorded (“Flavors”) but others in radically different form (“Whippin’ Piccadilly.”) He sang the title song from the newest Gomez album, How We Operate, which Ben Ottewell takes the lead vocal for on the album version. As a huge fan of the band it was fascinating for me to speculate about what insight into the creative process of the notoriously secretive Gomez boys seeing Ian solo might have granted me. The few of us packed in front of the small indoor stage where Ball played might be the only people ever to hear the song Ian submitted for consideration as the theme to “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff “Private Practice.” In a well-told introduction to the songlet much longer than the fifteen seconds Ball was given to work with, he explained that even though he picked the broadest, most obvious lyrics imaginable, he still suspected the song would be rejected.

Next up on the main stage was Brian Jonestown Massacre. What’s there to say? I imagine for a band like BJM, most people have long ago made their assessments. Like Cake they’ve been doing variations on the same theme for as long as they’ve been around, although I would argue that Brian Jonestown has done far less of a good job proving that their tiny little niche is one well worth spending an entire career in. The only guy with any stage presence is Joel Gion, who doesn’t really do anything other than have great facial hair, not that that isn’t ample justification for his membership in the band. Anton Newcombe seemed irritated to be there, spending most of his time in his far-corner stage spot with his back to the audience fiddling with amplifier knobs. Any sympathy he might have gotten from me for his commitment to playing the alienated rock star role to the hilt was lost with his obnoxious between-song speech involving the “recording of our next three albums in Iceland.” Honestly I don’t think Brian Jonestown Massacre is even supposed to be good live; they’re more like an ongoing life-as-performance-art piece. Which is good to know about but not a tremendous kick to witness in person. I’m glad I will be able to say someday I saw them… but I’m not going to forget how boring they were.

What a contrast the next band on the main stage provided. Art Brut didn’t just seem happy to be at Monolith, they seemed dedicated to exert every effort possible to make sure everyone in the crowd was having just as good a time as they were. Jasper Future and Ian Catskilkin cheerfully thieved 80s metal riffs while pinwheeling about with force so exaggerated a mime would find it exhausting. Drummer Mike played standing up, sending my brain reeling trying to recall another example of a band where that was the case. (All I could come up with: The Violent Femmes.) Eddie Argos performed with a gusto seemed designed to crush all critics who might suggest that Art Brut’s lead ranter isn’t really so much a musician as a folk-art curiosity. Argos might not have much regard for rhythm and harmony in the traditional sense, but what he does have is a steel-trap mind for hooks, verses and choruses. The backing vocals and insistent repeated lines of “Direct Hit” and “Bad Weekend” show a songwriter who’s absorbed the right lessons from the vast record collection Argos’s lyrics endlessly analyze. Art Brut isn’t a sideshow but a really good band, one I assure you is fully capable of playing a song the same way twice if they feel like it. Argos seemed to be having the time of his life, flashing the crowd, clambering around the edge of the stage worryingly like the U.K.’s answer to Robert Pollard, and leading the audience in a repeated chant of “Top of the Pops!” after he named each of the evening’s headliners in succession. After the frontman left the stage, the band kept shredding right along, inciting the audience to join them in a suitably over-the-top crescendo finale. Going from mostly unheard by the audience to having the entirety of Red Rocks screaming as loud as they did all weekend for a full ten minutes, Art Brut have to go down as the single biggest success of Monolith 2007. I’m sure my photographer and I were hardly the only folks in attendance to go grab their records first thing Sunday morning.

The next band to play was Spoon. Ah, Spoon. I have some stuff I have to say about them, and a lot of you people are not going to like it. But I’m afraid it must be said anyway. Spoon are a band I’ve been listening to since the early 90s, when they were one of the rare Matador Records bands from that era that didn’t become an indie success story. Like Railroad Jerk, Silkworm or Chavez, Spoon never became the next Pavement or GBV not because they weren’t good enough but because the timing never worked out quite right. However, to their credit, they avoided becoming a footnote to history. After Wilco, they became the second-biggest success story of a band to survive a determined attempt by a major label record company to assassinate their career and emerge afterwards as more commercially successful and artistically better than ever. The hot streak of albums Spoon has been on since Girls Can Tell is amazing; while they’re so good at making just tiny adjustments to their core sound that it’s hard to tell, 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga might be the best of the lot.

There was always one thing about the body of critical work regarding Spoon that bothered me: How Britt Daniel was always, underline always, praised specifically for his songwriting. For years, the Spoon entry in the Matador catalog read “if you know of a better songwriter than Britt Daniel out there somewhere, please send us a tape.” This always sounded vaguely like a backhanded slap to me. There are a lot of musicians—and frankly, a lot of songwriters better than Daniel—who never receive specifically that compliment because writers find less generic desciptors to apply. Finally, after seeing Spoon live for the first time at Monolith, I get what has been going on all of these years.

Spoon are a crummy live band. They really are. It’s too bad. Daniel doesn’t seem all that interested in the format. He broke my heart by not singing “I Turn My Camera On” in its album-version falsetto, and the only time he remembered to rock out even a little bit is while perfoming a song on the subject of rocking out, “The Beast and Dragon, Adored.” Drummer Jim Eno’s tempos were inconsistent and Spoon’s bass player and keyboardist rigidly recycled the lines exactly as played on record for the whole of the set. Tellingly, the only songs that the band stretched out on instrumentally were the same ones that have longer running lengths on the albums. Even when they did so it felt like more out of obligation than anything else. No one in the band can improvise even a little, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, you have to know your strengths and weaknesses. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with just playing short songs as they were written – short. Daniel strikes me as one of those detail-crazed rock obsessives for whom playing live doesn’t come very naturally. Others who fit the description, from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen to the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli, have realized how important a part being great live is to the total package of the rock band lifestyle and adapted. You needn’t look any further than Monolith performers the Decemberists to see how a personality not particularly suited to the role of big rock frontman can use his intelligence and passion to succeed at it in his own fashion. Daniel hasn’t absorbed and apparently isn’t interested in absorbing that lesson. And, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. By Chris Bell’s ghost, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” is a great song. The fact that played live it sounds even more like Elvis Costello & The Attractions circa Get Happy!! doesn’t hurt that assessment in the least.

The Flaming Lips took the stage last Saturday night, and it came as a relief to me and my aching back that from past experience I knew the Lips’ style as a live band: short and sweet. Since I last saw them they’ve retreated from using quite so many prerecorded instruments as the idea of what a Flaming Lips show ought to be has morphed and developed. It’s not to say that the band is lousy live. After beginning their career as a truly terrible live band the Lips gradually developed into one that was actually pretty excellent, particularly during the period Ronald Jones spent as their guitarist. Since Jones departed and the Lips entered their larger-than-large Soft Bulletin era, the idea of accurately representing their recorded music on stage has been an acknowledged impossibility. After some interesting but awful shows with the group playing along to a videotape of Steven Drozd drumming, they’ve gotten a touring drummer and accepted that at best they can just present the skeletons of the songs. Flaming Lips shows nowadays are more celebrations of the shared experiences of the group and their fans than any kind of artistically serious musical performances.

That said, they are growing nicely into their new role as revered elder statesmen, and their sets are growing more surprising as time passes. After several years of just playing “the hits” on stage, old weirdness like “Mountain Side” and “Your Invisible Now” is back in the set. Drozd even took a falsetto lead vocal on At War from the Mystics’ “Pompeii am Götterdämmerung.” It’s nice that the musical element of the show was at least able to compete with the visual portion. As many lineups and sounds as they have attempted over their long, strange career, the Flaming Lips’ central mission has always been to use to the absurd and unexpected to force listeners to consider anew their everday realities. Their shows these days are a wildly psychedelic testament to this nostalgic ideal, from the colorfully costumed crowd of true believers that joins them on stage to the woozy images of dancing naked girls and copulating reptiles that cavort across their Pink Floyd-sized giant video screen.

Entering the stage in a giant translucent plastic hamster ball, Wayne Coyne took his role as the most successful exemplar of all the artistic and social ideals Monolith bands were striving for all weekend at once whimsically and deadly seriously. Coyne isn’t the most articulate public speaker—that’s why he chooses to express himself through rock songs, duh—but he’s simply too thoughtful a man to let a singular experience like this festival pass without seizing the opportunity to make the spirit of the festival resonate beyond the weekend. One long jam the band seemingly indulged itself in, based on a loop from Led Zep’s “Kashmir” and featuring a canned trumpet solo mimed by Coyne on a toy horn, was much more than it first appeared to be. Later in the set Wayne showed the crowd the secret of the faux bugle, which was designed to allow nonmusical military personnel to fake the playing of “Taps” at the funerals of servicemen. This small gesture spoke volumes, more so than the repeated crudities towards the president urged from the stage by lesser spokesmen.

Imagine what we can accomplish, Wayne implied, if we can take the feelings of community and mutual support we’re all now experiencing singing “Waiting for a Superman” together and keep them going all the way to the next Monolith Festival. In that sense the Flaming Lips might not have been the best band to play all weekend—but they surely were the one with the most important message.