Today's update will be short and to the point. Why? Because it's late, and we have to be on a plane in a few hours. Arrgh.

Several of us began the music day at the famed Hideout party at Pok-E-Jo's, co-sponsored this year by fellow Chicago venue Metro. This made for a slightly more eclectic mix of artists than in previous years; instead of getting quietly and happily sloshed on free (or, this year, very inexpensive) beer while listening to alt-country bands, the attendees got sloshed on beer while listening to a mix of alt-country and rock bands.

While our "official" reason for attending the Hideout/Metro party was to complete an interview with Bloodshot steel guitarist Jon Rauhouse, and to shoot a few live photos for same, we stuck around for several hours, drinking very inexpensive beer and listening to bands, including sets by Giant Step, Fruit Bats, and Chris Mills and the City That Works. This last was by far the most interesting; members of our party who in the past have found Mills's work a bit tepid found this upbeat, electrified material a great deal more interesting.

Fast-forward to evening.

Our editor, honoring a promise, begins the evening at nondescript venue "Friends", there to see Milwaukee's Troubled Hubble. A typical lackluster 8:00 p.m. show? Hardly. The band has been encouraged to go for broke tonight, and they do it -- bouncing around the stage with terrifying youthful exuberance, pogoing happily, flailing away at their instruments, jumping from amps and railings, even wandering out into the street. And it's not all about the goofiness, either; the songs are good. They're relatively standard pop-rock stuff, with a teeny-tiny bite of emo/twee self-consciousness, but they're performed with such unaffected joy that they seem ten times better. A few fans in the room seem to know every word of the lyrics, too. The overall impression is of a band untainted by the industry bullshit that surrounds them -- a handful of young guys having a fantastic time playing music they enjoy. For an 8:00 p.m. show, this is far above average stuff.

If only we could say the same thing about Centaur, the new project from former Hum frontman Matt Talbott. Their plodding set strips the good bits (i.e. glorious surplus of ideas) from Hum's expansive sound, leaving only directionless riffing and lackluster laser light effects. The band themselves seem bored with the performance. The only bright spot in their performance is the presence, on stage, of a pair of illuminated, articulated Christmas reindeer. You know -- those wire reindeer "skeletons", threaded with and wrapped in tiny white lights, with a small motor inside the torso that allows the head to sway back and forth. I find myself getting increasingly involved in the world of these reindeer. "How many people does it take to make one?" I wonder. "Do they do it assembly-line style, so maybe there's a woman who fastens the legs to the torso and then another woman who attaches the head and puts the lights on, and then maybe an old guy who fits the motor together? How many of these things can the assembly line crew make in an hour? How much do they have to sell them for to make a profit? How long can the moving parts run before something wears down and breaks?"

This train of thought goes on, to ridiculous lengths, for several minutes. Then the song finishes. Centaur still look bored. They redeem themselves a bit with their final tune, which rocks a bit more, but we've consigned them to Dullsville.

DC-based dream-popsters Phaser fare even worse. We're bored within minutes, and head next door to Club DeVille for the brilliantly named I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Unfortunately, these guys' creative energy was all burned up coming up with their name, and it turns out that the particular darkness they've chosen is emo. Ack.

After a break for some Death Metal Pizza™, we decide to head for Emo's and get in line early for the Mudhoney show at 1:00. We're treated to plentiful crowd fireworks during our time in line, not the least of which was a mesh-cap-wearing shitmop who hollered "Fuck Emo's" by way of expressing his displeasure at being escorted off the premises.

Inside, Nebula flail away at their B-grade riff-rock. They near their cutoff time. Then they exceed it. Then they reach Mudhoney's start time. Then they exceed it, significantly. The crowd, while not violent, is not eating this up. Well past their sell-by date, Nebula leave the stage, bound for other sucky gigs, and we begin our painful wait for Mudhoney.

The particularly painful thing about waiting for Mudhoney, other than the proliferation of woodsy lesbians in the audience (go figure) and some assbag yelling "FURRY PICKLES" at the top of his voice, is the escalating Stripper Fights in our neck of the woods. A number of -- ahem -- dancers and their friends are interacting loudly in our vicinity. They're pulling each others' tops down, bearing tattooed breasts, humping their friends and, in one notable display, pouring beer over each other's thong-clad asses. Of course, we could be wrong -- these women could be accountants with a lot of clients in the tattooing industry -- but we doubt it. Accountants wouldn't fling beer around the way these idiots do, leaving us and other audience members feeling sticky and uncharitable.

Mudhoney finally take the stage around 12:30, and they take a few songs to get up to speed. By the time they reach "Touch Me I'm Sick", they're in full flare-up -- but something is missing. Mudhoney are competent musicians these days, and while it's gratifying to hear their songs performed with a passable degree of musical know-how, some of the charm is gone. Besides, the Stripper Fights have kicked into high-gear, prompting one of the Emo's bartenders to give us one of the most impressive displays of bar-vaulting and breaking-it-up-now-people skills we've ever seen.

With Mudhoney's set perhaps halfway finished, we bail. Sleep beckons. Pretty urgently, in fact.

And there you have it -- another 96 hours of non-stop musical entertainment compressed into a tidy few thousand words and delivered directly to you by your friends at Splendid. Now, if you'll excuse us, we're tired, and we have only 361 days to get our sleep schedules sorted out before SXSW 2004...