• Courtesy Of Luke Awtry
• Thus Love

Big shout-out to Burlington rockers Robber Robber, who merited the Pitchfork treatment this week when their new album, Wild Guess, got a pretty positive review from the website's oft-hard-to-please critics. It's another moment in what feels like a steady upward trajectory for the indie-rock group.

Over the weekend, I headed to Foam Brewers after the Flaming Lips show at Waterfront Park to catch Robber Robber's release party with fellow area indie rockers Greaseface. The scene was truly chaotic, in the best sense. As I stared down the massive line to get into the brewery, I was simultaneously annoyed that I hadn't popped over earlier and hyped that a local show was pulling that kind of attention. The crowd also highlighted the growing momentum of indie rock in the Queen City: Robber Robber, Greaseface, Lily Seabird, Noah Kesey and Greg Freeman (among others) have built up the most robust scene Burlington has witnessed in years.

Even better? It's not just Burlington. The What Doth Life contingent down in Windsor continues to produce good records, with excellent offerings from McAsh and the Pilgrims in the past few months. I was also recently privy to an advance listen of the forthcoming album from Brattleboro's THUS LOVE, and holy shit does it rock.

Forget the jam bands and Noah Kahan clones (of which there are so many these days): Vermont is indie-rock central right now. Do yourself a favor and check in before the inevitable period when most of them take off for bigger markets!

Once upon a time, seemingly in another life, your friendly neighborhood music editor was in the film biz. I don't drink enough these days to get the kind of drunk required to properly regale you with horror stories of that wretched industry, but I can tell you what was unequivocally my least favorite gig during the decade or so I spent working on films.

In 2004, while still in film school, several of my classmates and I were hired to shoot a documentary about what was supposed to be the swan song of jam-band giants Phish. The Phab Phour had booked a farm in Coventry to host their "final" festival. Of course, we all know the band reemerged a few years later and picked up where it left off, but for one dreadfully wet and muddy weekend in the Northeast Kingdom, the Phish world grappled with its soul, terrible weather, a very drugged-out band and some big feelings. Suffice it to say, the documentary we were hired to shoot never saw the light of day, as what was supposed to be a cheery, epic send-off of Vermont's biggest band became a depressing slog.

Phear not, Phanatics! Someone else made a doc about the festival. Or rather, the massive traffic jam the event created. Premiering on Friday, August 2, at the Coventry Community Center, "JAM" was shot by longtime Phish fan Alex Daltas when he was just 16 years old. Twenty years after that shit show, Daltas presents his account of the massive gridlock, where thousands of fans abandoned their vehicles on the side of the highway and just kept walking to the venue, determined to hear "You Enjoy Myself."

It sounds like a lovely celebration of music driving people to do whatever it takes to hear the songs they love. For me, it's more like a trigger warning and a callback to bribing farmers to tow my car out of four feet of mud. But who knows, maybe the film will heal some of that trauma?

Eye on the Scene

Last week's live music highlights from photographer Luke Awtry

• Luke Awtry
• The Flaming Lips at Grand Point North

The Flaming Lips, Grand Point North, Burlington, Friday, July 26: It was September 2015 and less than six months before I started photographing live music when the Flaming Lips last played Burlington's Waterfront Park. I was there but so far back in the crowd that I didn't really get the full experience. This time was different: I was in the pit and, for the first four songs, stuck between two enormous pink robots, the adversaries from the 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. To merely say the band played that album in its entirety would be an understatement. This was a performance. Maybe even the show of the year. Picture 20-foot-tall robots, a stage-wide rainbow, huge moving eyeballs and lips, bouncing balls as large as Volkswagen Beetles, front man Wayne Coyne dressed as a delicate flower, blasts from an arsenal of confetti guns, and a gigantic FUCK YEAH BURLINGTON inflatable being passed out into the crowd while Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" played us all out. And what a wonderful — and biodegradable — mess was made in the name of pure fun and joy.

Listening In

Spotify playlist of Vermont jams