It's really excellent when you're home for the holidays and get to snuggle with your family for a little while and share stories and gifts and hugs. But eventually the heady eggnog fumes wear off and you're left with a handful of asshole idiot fatties asleep in front of a Blockbuster favorite, from whom you must periodically escape.
Luckily for you, Fullerton's hometown boys the Adolescents are making a holiday-time stop in Santa Ana. In keeping with the theme, consider picking up one of the two releases the band dropped this year—OC Confidential or Naughty Women in Black Sweaters:The Complete Demos—along with your ticket, and make someone's Chrismukah that much better. The releases may have been spawned in 2001, when the band's reunion (which spat in the face of their final “this is it for good” announcement in 1989) was met with unexpected enthusiasm. Prior to the '89 dissolution, the perennially nice Steve Soto (who I will always carry a torch for, after he unknowingly called me on the East Coast in the middle of the night to answer some interview questions at this very time last year) and various musician-ephemera (including ex-Germs/Nirvana Pat Smear) played on and off since 1980 in this first-string Orange County punk band.
Their two shows will test your mettle, with BYO's explosively dramatic Cadillac Tramps and pedomorphic label daddies Youth Brigade opening, as well as the thrashy-bashy Wrecking Crew and other dudes I know nothing about. The Adolescents are coincidentally the perfect companion music for Christmas. Their songs are both, well, adolescent and obstinate, waging punk war with guitars; they're also darkly introspective, the band having witnessed some bleak shit individually and together over the years. This is, of course, akin to the season: it's the rare individual who can escape without at least one hissy fit (bonus points if it's at your mom's house) and one darkly existential crisis courtesy of some stolen Letter V drugs and the impending new year.
The Adolescents with Cadillac Tramps, Wrecking Crew, the Crowd and Youth Brigade at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana, (714) 957-0600. Thurs.-Fri., Dec. 29-30, 8 p.m. $20.
