Here is the thing you should know about SXSW: It's nice to have air-conditioning.

Sure, you may have the opportunity to see 5,367 bands at any point during your time in Austin, but at some point you are going to seek refuge. Which is what we did for most of the afternoon as we spent our day talking to bands like Metric, Broken Social Scene, Miike Snow and countless others at our Loft on Sixth Street.

In the process, we met Erik Estrada (no, for reals) and also gave away passes to our Muse show tomorrow through our MySpace Music Twitter account, leading to scores of re-tweets and one fan who was brought to tears when he finally won.

So what do you do after a day like that? You immediately head off to see the breakout SXSW band of... 1993! We started off the night by going to the Merge showcase where label owners Superchunk were playing one of the only shows they will play all year.

In the process, the inhumanly energetic indie rock institution proved this much: Wearing sunglasses after 7:45 PM is a bad look (our apologies to the dude in the balcony). Well, that is, unless you are the band's bass player. (Laura Balance, we salute you!).

Superchunk played two new songs in their early evening set and, at the request of recent label mates Let's Wrestle, they also played the late '90s gem "Hello Hawk." After they left the stage, their UK counterparts came on and performed a score of songs off of their debut album, In The Court Of Wrestling Let's, most of which sounded like early Pavement and later Blur. Which is a huge compliment.

From there, we jetted over to Stubb's to see The Soft Pack play a warm-up spot for Broken Social Scene, who turned out an undeniably triumphant set with their friends in Metric.

Before all that, though, the Soft Pack's songs, just as they do on their stellar debut, throbbed with tension, but this was probably the last venue you might see a band this personal and demanding. We're going to have to see them later this week at a venue that has more beer on the floor.

Maybe that's why it felt so good to leave the open air of Stubb's for the stuffy confines of the Beauty Bar, where working class punks Titus Andronicus (pictured above) played to far less people who, in turn, seemed far more moved by their tunes. It was the best set we saw all night. There were sing-alongs. There were tall cans of beers. And there were major chords that were played with sloppy perfection.

As the crowd pogo-ed to the final notes of their set, bearded frontman Patrick Stickles abruptly brought things to a halt. "Sorry, we wanted to play the last 45 seconds of that song but we ran out of time," he said, looking at the stage manager. That's SXSW in a nutshell. You're the best band in the world, until it's time for someone else to take the stage.