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Rain and live music just don’t mix.  It puts out cigarettes, gets your camera wet, and turns the ground below you into a sole-sucking swirl of muddy filth.  These are the times when the festival, the bands, and the audience must band together in a collective effort against the gods, a message that says, ‘mother nature can piss on me all it wants, I’m still gonna have a motherfucking good time’.  When opportunity knocked at the Fun Fun Fun Fest on Sunday, well, let’s just say those were at least two funs too many.

Soggy weather, technical issues, flat performances and a shut-down stage marred a potentially solid day of music.  Things started out strong – despite the steady drizzle and a ho-hum outing by Fuck Buttons, Atlas Sound followed with a solid set of Pavement and Sebadoh-influenced indie rock.  Band leader Bradford Cox disclosed, in a somehow prophetic musing, that he’s “doing good, I’m kinda wet, I kinda have to take a shit” before leading the band through highlights like “Walkabout” and bringing Broadcast’s Trish Keenan on stage to offer her vocal expertise.

The day’s festivities remained unwavering as Why? took the stage to rap, rock, sing Yeasayer covers and dance around with maracas.  “Song of the Sad Assassin” and “Fatalist Palmistry”, two cuts off the band’s 2008 release Alopecia, were among the standouts as the crowd began to realize they were slowly sinking into the soft, suctioning ground below.

As the sun began to drop, Memphis-based Lucero took to the stage with a backing horn section they borrowed from Black Joe Lewis.  The horn players were grossly underutilized until the last quarter of the set, when the band as a whole finally picked up their collective slack to turn a sub-standard alt-rock set into soulful heartland rock of Springsteenian proportions.

While the Lucero set was uneven, it was a blessing compared to the Orange Stage’s following two acts, Mission of Burma and Crystal Castles.  Burma, despite offering the crowd cuts from their 1982 classic VS. album like “Trem Two”, were plagued with mic issues from the very start, rendering the voices of guitarist Roger Miller, bassist Clint Conley, and drummer Peter Prescott flat at best and nonexistent at worst.  Ironically, it’s one technical issue this writer would have embraced with open arms for Crystal Castles, who’s fiercely stomping, bleep bloop electro was completely awash in the skinned-cat, migraine noise that is Margaret Osborn’s “singing” voice.  While glow sticks plumed up from the crowd like a psychedelic smokestack and Osborn danced around the stage with a handheld strobe, the solid music was cut down to size by Osborn’s awful voice, which is apparently layered deep enough into the mix in the studio that her banshee shriek isn’t so noticeable on the band’s self-titled debut.

While Osborn bled the crowd’s ears, the Blue Stage hosted an unexpected surprise – a fantastic performance by Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema that demanded one of the only encores of the weekend.  A schizophrenic blend of hip-hop, broken beat drum-and-bass and seething electronica blasted the crowd while the curvy MC Blaya danced in shudders and spasms, her day-glo orange face paint gleaming under the black lights.

Buraka undoubtedly showed up their successor, the Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA with special guest King Khan, the latter of which basically stood in the background playing guitar for the majority of the set.  Ending the night’s schedule on the Orange Stage was Of Montreal, whose zany brand of Bowie-esque psychedelic glam rock has always been difficult for this writer to digest on record, but there’s no denying the eye and ear candy when this costumed freakshow performs live.

I wish I could say that the weather was the only reason Sunday’s performances were a bit subpar, and of course several of the bands delivered solid shows in spite of the elements.  But there was little that stood out in Waterloo Park on Sunday – it seems the solid lineup did not bring out the competitive edge in these bands, and the weather simply bogged down everyone’s mood.  The Fun Fun Fun Fest may have earned its name over years of consistently excellent weekends of music, but at least for Sunday, it carried a hint of false advertising.