This year’s lineup includes: The Presidents of the United States of America, Flowmotion, EOTO, Hot Buttered Rum, The Mother Hips, McTuff, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, The Mutaytor, The Everyone Orchestra, Five Alarm Funk, Delihi 2 Dublin, Acorn Project, Rejoice, Panda Conspiracy, Spanish for 100, Be Careful, Publish the Quest, Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder, Dept. of Energy, Randy Hansen, Groove Patrol, Nicki Bluhm, Levi Ware, Manooghi Hi, Andrew Vait & The Eternal Fair, One Man Banned, , The Librarians, Vicci Martinez, Wisdom, Beecraft, and Josh Clauson, Ben Bruce, and Robert Sarazin Blake

Everything you need to know about this year’s festival can be found right here at:
www.summermeltdown.com

Dennis’ Pick of the Week
Flowmotion: Ghost Pepper (Flowmotion Music)
Of late, rock has gotten a bit inelegant. There’s edginess, aloofness, ginned up loft, experimentation and angst aplenty, but there’s a real dirth of quality melodies and un-syrupy romance and hopefulness that don’t resort to clichés. Part of the reason ’70s classic rock endures is the abiding craftsmanship and real savvy of its best exponents at creating sonic spaces with lots of room for people to inhabit. There’s a real art to creating rock that’s primed to connect across a wide spectrum AND doesn’t feel like some gross, lowest common denominator ploy. In Ghost Pepper (released March 17), Flowmotion delivers a song cycle that’s as skillfully wrought and artfully sculpted as “classic” forebears like Traffic and early Journey and Doobie Brothers, while managing to work in nuances in keeping with peers like The Mother Hips and ALO. If you dream and stumble and love and struggle, well, there’s plenty to grab onto here, and the music carries one along with a deceptively easy flow. This is not simple music but in keeping with their name, Flowmotion makes things seem easy, never showboating or strutting, letting the quality of their tunes, lyrics and musicianship speak for themselves while maintaining a distinctively organic feel, where one senses the players in the room together chasing something big & true and capturing it with their bare hands and nakedly passionate vocals. Oh sure, there’s blistering guitar solos and crazy, time changing turnarounds but all of it serves the songs, which are uniformly excellent and show that the whole damn band has real compositional acumen. Captured largely live in the studio in a whirlwind session with relentlessly great producer Scott Colburn (Arcade Fire, Animal Collective), Ghost Pepper hums with life – hard won happiness and sorrowful moments distilled into a very useful tool for our own living. There’s real focus here, though one can hear all the jazzbo-technical, jam-ready bits lurking in the curves, making this an extremely satisfying home listening experience that also stirs high hopes for the live counterparts to come. Ghost Pepper is the work of real pros more than ready for AOR airplay and a much wider audience beyond their fervent Pacific Northwest following, and more simply, a lovely album packed with muscular, graceful rock ‘n’ roll of the very best kind. (Dennis Cook)

Crafted with Grammy Award winning producer Scott Colburn (Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Sun City Girls), Ghost Pepper has the feel of Wilco, ALO and The Mother Hips, or leaning further back, Traffic, Journey and Little Feat in their fighting prime, an emotionally honest, believably hopeful song cycle that reacquaints one with the power of a fully formed album and not just some random jumble of new tunes.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” says Colburn. “It made me realize that a band like Flowmotion is the kind of band that would be huge in an earlier decade because they are REALLY good, professional musicians that take music making very seriously. They have all the cards in the right place and do what it takes to succeed in making music for a living. These days, you don’t see this level of musicianship. I think over time, the general public has accepted less and less in terms of quality of music, so it makes it hard when a band like this comes through. The general public doesn’t know quite what to make of it because they’ve been exposed to dreck for so long. They can’t handle something that is truly great. That’s why the legions of Flowmotion followers are an elite club of people with taste and the ability to personally find the orchids in a sea of dandelions.”

Ghost Pepper West Coast Tour
3/31 – Cultureworks – Ashland, OR
4/1 – Jambalaya – Arcata, CA
4/2 – Miners Foundry – Nevada City, CA
4/3 – The Connecticut Yankee – San Francisco, CA
4/4 – Aubergine After Dark – Sebastopol, CA
4/9 – The Brick – Roslyn, WA
4/10 – Knitting Factory Concert House – Spokane, WA

Any FLOWMOTION fans out there who are Twitter inclined? Please let everyone know what you think of the new album by tweeting “@Flowmotion”

You can also share a free stream of the album on your Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/Blog/etc by clicking “Share” right from the streaming page!