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?

• Photo by Johanna Breiding

Mirah, you are so good! A lot of performers would stagnate after recording and performing for so long— singer/songwriters especially, who might subconsciously feel confined by their form— so it was really exciting to be surprised by your set and to see you taking so many risks. I've seen you perform many times over the years, always thinking you to be one of the Northwest's finest singer/songwriters, but with your high-energy set yesterday, you actually took it to another level.

Gone are the days of softly strumming behind the guitar— Bumbershoot Monday saw Mirah on the microphone, rocking "The Garden" to an electro beat while a super-packed audience nodded their heads.

The cold, overcast weather yesterday seemed to bum the hell out most of the Bumbershoot crowd, which appeared to be the biggest of the weekend, if frustration levels regarding moving from one stage to the other was any gauge. Why the hell was I wearing gloves in early September? Raining and temps in the mid 50s? Summer FAIL. I took it as an ominous sign when I walked onto the Seattle Center grounds while the Minus 5 were covering the Dream Syndicate’s deeply moving Lou Reed-ian classic “Tell Me When It’s Over.” Yes, do tell.

The gloomy climate influenced my choice to check out Akron/Family indoors at KEXP’s Bshoot lounge. I arrived to see the group’s drummer and bassist engaged in a rimshot and tiny tin percussion toy duet, evoking a horse’s canter, while the guitarist strummed a gentle folk motif. Then with little warning, the song erupted into a rumbling, slashing noise rocker somewhere between Neil Young’s “Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black)” and Mercury Rev’s “Syringe Mouth.” The song, like much of A/F’s material, evolved unpredictably. Metallic percussion solos, abstract noise breakdowns, tribal tom-tom hypnosis, Native American chants, trad alt-country tropes, primal screams all factor into A/F's mongrel approach. One song during A/F’s later set at the Broad Street Stage featured the beat to Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” and warped guitar radiation redolent of ’80s Butthole Surfers. “I think we scared the rain away,” guitarist Seth Olinsky announced, before A/F broke into "Woody Guthrie’s America." Based on what I saw, I’d have to rank Akron/Family Bumbershoot 2009’s second-best act. (See previous Bumbershoot posts to determine #1.)

Another slot in KEXP’s lounge featured Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré. Playing an acoustic, he was accompanied by an electric guitarist, bassist, a guy who sat on the floor and tapped what looked like a turtle shell with chopsticks, and a young, long-haired white dude on many percussion implements. Focusing on his new CD, Fondo, Touré and company play a form of blues that relies on brisk, cyclical riffing and complex chording, often augmented by Touré’s plaintive, mildly pained wail. The tunes ramble, undulate, and mesmerize, and mostly end on a dime, to breathtaking effect.

Modest Mouse just killed the whole damn festival on the mainstage, and a proper review will be coming soon, but for now, here's the set list, which for my tastes was pretty nicely balanced between new and old—the newest was "Satellite Skin," the oldest was "Dramamine"—with an emphasis on material from The Moon and Antarctica:

"Gravity Rides Everything"
"The View"
"Education"
"Dramamine"
"Dashboard"
"Satellite Skin"
"Baby Blue Sedan"
"King Rat"
"Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"
"Shit Luck"
"3rd Planet"
"Wild Pack of Family Dogs"
"Parting of the Sensory"
"Float On"
"Whale Song"

(encore)
"Paper Thin Walls"
"Bury Me With It"

You can't catch everything, but sometimes you catch just a drift of something as you're passing by en route to somewhere else. So, a couple passing impressions:

-Dyme Def: Big World Breaks, all decked out in Dyme Def t-shirts, were pretty impressive—guitars, two woodwinds, a three-person choir, big drums and extensive percussion—but for their first song at least, all that instrumental activity threatened to drown the MCs out.

-Common Market: Rappa ternt sanga! RA Scion, also playing with a full band, was working some old-timey, semi-vaudevillian bluesman thing, singing in an almost Waits-ish growl; I'm not sure I'm feeling at least not on 30 seconds of exposure.

-The crowd: I wondered about attendance dropping on Saturday, and predicted that Sunday's rain might clear the place, but it seemed more crowded yesterday than the day before. It still wasn't the overwhelming choke I've seen in past years, though. (And, of course, the rain looks just a touch worse today.)

No Age at Exhibition Hall somehow managed to sound acceptable at this detail-killing space. Their concise noise pop sounded as catchy as it was jagged, the drums and guitar generating a punchy attack that sliced through the hall’s acoustic inadequacies. No Age’s songs carry something of Hüsker Dü’s uplift and heft, if not the nuance of that legendary Minnesota trio; they even have a singing drummer à la Grant Hart in Dean Spunt. The candy apple grey buzz guitarist Randy Randall created was a dense, swarming delight.

I cut out early from No Age to see Roy Ayers, the revered soul-jazz vibraphonist. At Fisher Green Stage, he and his mature ensemble started with a mellow ballad about “sharing dreams.” It was archetypal smooooth jazzzzz. After the song, the distinguished Mr. Ayers commented about how the Seattle weather was brisk, like San Francisco’s, and then he said, “We’d like to ask each of you to take off your clothes.” I laughed. They then broke into a bustlingly elegant version of Dizzie Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” The next tune quoted “My Favorite Things” and there was a bass solo of Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” some bop-ish squawking and then the drummer went off on a solo during which he tattooed every flat, inanimate surface on the stage, some of it with a towel covering his eyes, some of it done behind his back-style. It was madness, definitely unexpected. Ayers & co. also did “Don’t Stop the Feelin’” and “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” which sounded all kinds of wrong at night, with a distinct chill in the air. It was a serious gaffe not to schedule Ayers during the middle of the afternoon, when his style of breezy, soulful jazz would’ve resonated much more.

Addicted to Holy Fuck after their afternoon slot live on the air for KEXP, I headed to the Broad Street Stage to catch them for the second time Sunday. This set was more expansive and spacey than the one they did for KEXP, and it showed that these four Canadians know well how to adapt to their environs and read their crowds. They closed with a triumphant “Lovely Allen,” a tradition I can get behind 100 percent, as it’s one of those songs with which you could say goodbye to the human race as you rocketed to another, better planet with no regrets. Whenever people at Bumbershoot asked me about scoring drugs (a more common occurrence than you’d imagine), I told them to just check out Holy Fuck. The side affects are all positive.

Out of the frigid air and into the SkyChurch for DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. He basically rehashed his Stax Records mashup DJ set he performed at Nectar earlier this year, but on the SkyChurch’s rad sound system and with its huge screen, the effect was magnified multifold.

Spooky gave us one of the least boring history lessons in the history of history lessons. As key figures and musicians from Stax’s rich legacy flickered supersized behind him, Spooky started with Jesse Jackson’s über-powerful speech at the Wattstax concert in LA and then raced through several seminal cuts from its catalog, with mostly abrupt but not jarring transitions ratcheting up the excitement. Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” “Otis Redding’s version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Booker T. & the MGs’ “Green Onions,” Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming,” and many other deathless cuts niced up the SkyChurch. The sound was so massive and dialed in; I decided to forgo the earplugs. In a situation like this, it’s best to submit yourself to getting fucked every which way without lube or condoms—figuratively speaking, though this music is so libidinous, you’d gladly give in to a literal shagging, as well.

Spooky unveiled some of dance music’s essential atoms, the sources of countless samples and the inspiration for countless producers worldwide. Hearing it all on a golden sound system and spun by a knowledgeable selector was a damned blessing and one of Bumbershoot’s highlights, for sure.

Still addicted to Holy Fuck (ain’t no cure for this), I walked (or did I float?) up hills—but not dales—to Neumos to witness their after-Bumber set. Somehow, they increased the intensity for this, their third gig of the day/night. They got a bunch of hipsters, many of whom likely didn’t know Holy Fuck from Steve Aoki, to go apeshit on the dance floor. HF’s combination of streamlined funkiness and kosmische textural embellishments makes me think DFA Records would be wise to sign them. Their motorik-heavy, psychedelic dance muzik is a perfect fit with that of LCD Sounsystem and the Juan Maclean.

This entire Neumos gig appeared to be one big marketing ploy, but, hell, Holy Fuck turned it into a transcendent party, a PhD-level seminar on groove science and the chemistry of ecstasy. Let the record show that Holy Fuck fucking owned Bumbershoot 2009.

(All things Bumbershoot on Line Out can be found here; the Stranger's Guide to Bumbershoot, featuring previews of everything happening at the festival and a customizable schedule, can be found here.)