Smogtown’s punk songs come built on the Adolescents, TSOL and the Beach Blvd. bands and bear such heavy production that sometimes that it’s almost like Chrome instead of the Crowd. They’ve got the South OC punk hooks if not the punk harmonies (concerted shouting fits in that space instead), but also a fearsome commitment to the world they recognized and reinvented on their definitive Fuhrers of the New Wave LP—which makes them philosophically almost Devo. Their unremittingly dark Southern California is all ash, sirens and stucco—like the hollowed-out neighborhood in Suburbia, where the kids hang out only until the bulldozers finally rumble up the driveway.
Sun., Sept. 6, 9 p.m., 2009
