For the couple songs I caught, Say Hi sounded as good as I've ever seen them, playing as a trio with frontman Eric Elbogen on guitar and vocals backed by a good and rumbling rhythm section. The mix was nice, and Elbogen's voice was more assertive and less mumbly than I remembered. He introduced a song about vampires, and I heard some guy in the crowd ask another guy if he'd seen Twilight yet. He hadn't. A couple kids were making out furiously nearby.

I may have seen the Lonely Forest in passing before—I see a lot of shows—but I'd never really watched the band with a critical eye until just yesterday, something that seemed long overdue given how much praise they've gotten in the press lately. But here's something you haven't heard about the Lonely Forest: they are soooooo boring and average and bland. They make Sunny Day Real Estate sound like the fucking Boredoms. Sure, musically, the Lonely Forest are perfectly competent players, and band-leader John Van Deusen can sing (in fact he tends to really over-sing), but their songs are just the most forgettable kind of big, bloated, radio-ready power pop—all outsized, minor-key melodrama and that over-the-top falsetto signifying emotional depths and heights not really substantiated by trite lyrics ("don't be afraid to live!" "every face reveals a story!" "you're beautiful, but you're in deep!"). This is the kind of stuff you might find in the shallow end of the Twilight soundtrack pool: dickless, arena-aimed indie with mega-church praise-rock band levels of subtlety. The benefit of being so middle of the road, though, is that you get that big, fat hump of the bell curve; when I left after a few songs, there was a long, snaking line of kids waiting in the rain to get in.

Speaking of the big, fat hump of the bell curve, I dropped in for a minute on the Black Eyed Peas afternoon Main Stage set just to confirm that this was a band with absolutely nothing to offer me live. (A colleague suggested that the reason I didn't like the Lonely Forest was that I'm not a 16 year old girl—it's true!—and while at first that seemed like a pretty shaky way to defend a musical act, relativist and condescending, Black Eyed Peas reminded me that, yes, some music is just made for children, and the adults who think like them.) Of course, the band's stage set was gigantic, all lit-up screens and high risers and the band dressed like some bastard child of the Matrix and Public Enemy, the sound was super loud and clear compared to say the Yeah Yeah Yeahs the day before (you didn't even need to go into the stadium to hear the Peas), and they perform with a Disney-like level of professionalism (Fergie no doubt brought some Kids Incorporated discipline to the band when she joined), but yikes. As I was leaving the stadium, Fergie was thanking the audience, in a cartoonishly enthusiastic growl, for making some record or other #1, before launching into the limp, warmed-over (but still immaculately engineered and absurdly polished) ballad "Big Girls Don't Cry," a song about how it's hard "to be a big girl now"—possibly it's a song about the pain of peeing your pants?

Mirah sounded great on the Broad Street stage, her and her band playing subtle, spare arrangements—of acoustic guitar, drums, harp, mandolin, fiddle, and more—that managed to sound intimate while still cutting clearly across the long lawn (trust me, I even checked from back in the beer garden). "Are you guys here for today or for the whole weekend," she asked the crowd by way of introduction. "The whole weekend? It's a lot of music to take in. Can you handle it?" I prefer Mirah's older stuff to the new album, (a)spera, but those songs sounded just fine live, and the band played a couple older tracks before I had to take off—the gentle epic "Mt. St. Helen's," the coy, klezmer-ish of "Light the Match"—as well as a cover of Old Time Relijun's "Manticore/Lion Tamer" (Mirah: "One of the most popular bands to cover; everyone covers an Old Time Relijun song").

Champagne Champagne were on point, Pearl crowd-surfing (and apparently crowd-walking, although I missed that), Thomas Gray and Mark Gajadhar holding things down, Gajadhar as always rocking the keys and the tambourine to great effect. But the scene was nowhere near as raging and live as their previous night's "secret" show at Sole Repair—that place looked about ready to explode. Also, the MCs seemed to be kind of struggling to be heard over Gajadhar's glossed-out, synth-heavy but occasionally funk-sampling productions.

At the tail end of her set, Janelle Monae, dancing frenetically, spiked her mic so she could crowd surf, and kept on hand-jiving to the beat the whole time she was on top of the audience. Showmanship.

The Cave Singers sounded good, perfectly pleasant and occasionally even rousing and electrified on the Mural Ampitheater Stage, but overall kind of forgettable. I'd put their record on for company, or dig it around a campfire, but I wouldn't be left with their songs stuck in my head. Pete Quirk's voice is faltering but fiery, Derek Fudesco's guitar picking turns at times hypnotically twangy and tangling, Marty Lund's drumming is gently restrained, favoring toms and, on one song, bongos. The melodica is always a nice touch. Also, Quirk onstage is like the world's youngest old coot.

Before the show, I was giving 50/50 odds that Truckasauras would be projecting their videos on their dinky little drop-screen even though they'd be playing in front of the the EMP Sky Church's towering LED display—that's just the kind of willfully scrappy, analog luddites these guys are. But no, the band had their TV Carnage-like montages playing on the big screen, where they were kind of blurry and indistinct, giving them a rather psychedelic quality as opposed to just eliciting the usual cheap laughs. "We are crasy ecstatic about the visuals on this fucking screen," said band member Adam Swan between songs. They sounded great on EMP's sound system, the bass low and booming but clean, everything clear—in fact, I could stand to hear Truck sounding a little less clean a little more dangerously loud and blown-out. (I also couldn't help but compare the band to Holy Fuck, the other instrumental electronic-ish act I'd seen over the weekend, and feel a little let down—Holy Truck have this weird thing where they build up for a bit, but then instead of hitting a crescendo and breaking back down into a groove, their parts kind of come undone anticlimactically, things fall apart and are gradually pieced back together, and it can feel like so much variation and elaboration rather than gratifying resolution.) Still, those few descending chords on "Porkwich" just fucking crush, and Tyler Swan's little scrunched-elbow dancing is adorable. I still love you, Truckasauras.

Whew. Which brings us to Modest Mouse.