Just after commenting on the profligacy of marijuana smoke in the audience at Bamboozle Left festival on Saturday, Circa Survive singer Anthony Green had a stoner revelation of his own.

“Look over there, it’s the moon and the sun, both up there at once,” he said, to the general bemusement of the experimental rock band’s fans. “It’s a battle, and the darkness is winning.” 

The encroaching bleakness of night seemed an apt descriptor of the state of emo at Bamboozle Left. The genre has, in recent years, become shorthand for pretty much any kind of earnest, fashion-addled rock music made for teenagers (heck, even the rapper 50 Cent headlined last year’s installment).

But with a few exceptions, the first night of the weekend-long sugar rush at Angel Stadium felt wearily monochromatic. Anaheim fans might have reason to feel especially begrudged. The version of the festival hitting New Jersey in May has, quite simply, a vastly more interesting lineup, with headliners including Paramore, the rapper Drake, prog-synth weirdos MGMT and bespangled pop tart Ke$ha. As fan-beloved as veterans like the operatically self-loathing Say Anything and glam-goth stalwarts AFI are, the Anaheim edition felt like it was curated by an emo algorithm. And a seriously uninspiring undercard left little reason to show up before sundown, save for the ever-peppy street punk of the Bouncing Souls. 

But once Bamboozle turned itself over to wanton arena-rock impulses, things got a bit better. Circa Survive was the find of the festival, and its forthcoming major-label debut “Blue Sky Noise” feels like a crossover hit. Even if Green vastly overestimates the appeal of his falsetto, his band plays a fanged and freaky take on hardcore that pulls from prog-rock, metalcore, early D.C. punk and a dozen other micro-niches to be fought over on message boards. They lack the acidic sex appeal of the Blood Brothers, but they share an omnivorousness and attention to detail.

Max Bemis, the singer of the L.A.-based sextet Say Anything, has been opening his veins on record for a half-dozen years. His absolute inability to self-edit in sharing the travails of his sex life earned him a devoted young following, and his ambitions on record have only grown since his 2004 breakout “…Is A Real Boy.” Last year’s self-titled album tapped a well of power-punk black comedy on songs like “Hate Everyone,” and now that Bemis seems to have his well-documented drug ad psychological demons under control, he’s become a smarmily engaging frontman.  

But there was not a nickel bag of irony to be found during Angels & Airwaves electronica-besotted, U2-aspiring stadium rock. Singer Tom DeLonge, also of Blink 182, is pitching Angels as a kind of experiment in band-as-venture-capitalist with its own social-networking portal. In that way, its set was a pretty convincing initial public offering for new album “Love” -- even if the quartet’s eager, sci-fi-inspired lyrics would make hipper eyes roll, their M83-influenced synthscapes held up better.

The Bay Area-based headliner AFI remains one of the most kinetic voices in punk nearly 20 years into its career. They’ve long dabbled in Danzig-friendly goth imagery that never quite jibed with their skate-able hardcore. But on recent albums they’ve aimed at the bleeding heart of the Billboard charts with singles like “Miss Murder” and “Beautiful Thieves.” Its great latest record “Crash Love” is a trashy lipstick kiss that could even win some converts at this late stage. Singer Davey Havok flailed and pirouetted across the stage, in a glittery coat, mocking the masculine impulses of many thick-necked peers.

The set was a lesson for those worn down by the rest of the day. The best cure for unremitting darkness is a gold-sequined blazer and an arched eyebrow.   

-- August Brown

Photo: AFI lead vocalist Davey Havok performs at the Bamboozle Left festival at Angel Stadium in Anaheim. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

The reunited trio amps up the racy humor in the first of two concerts at Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

Near the end of Blink-182's show Thursday night at Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, bassist Mark Hoppus revealed what anyone who'd witnessed the previous hour already knew -- during the four-year hiatus that this SoCal trio recently ended, his bandmate Tom DeLonge hadn't grow up one bit.

"Donny, you're like a child," Hoppus told the guitarist, paraphrasing a line from "The Big Lebowski."

After calling it quits in 2005, Hoppus, DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker began playing together again late last year following a plane crash that Barker survived but that killed four others, including the drummer's assistant and bodyguard. Blink performed its first concert since 2004 in May at a T-Mobile party on the Paramount Studios lot, and this summer the band's been on the road playing the hits that made it one of the most successful pop-punk acts of all time.

Thursday's show was the first of two at the Irvine venue, which seats approximately 17,000 people.

In its original incarnation, Blink wrote about the traumas and triumphs of teenhood with an uncommon grasp of the duality that defines that age; songs such as "Dammit" and "All the Small Things" delivered a potent mixture of humor and melancholy, hope and resignation.

They were on a hiatus of indefinite length. Then Travis Barker was critically injured. As the trio gathered, the old times returned.

It took a brush with disaster to get the members of the multiplatinum-selling pop-punk trio Blink-182 to stop giving each other the cold shoulder after a four-year "hiatus" as a band. Specifically, it took drummer Travis Barker nearly dying last September in a plane crash -- which claimed the lives of his assistant and bodyguard -- to make the group's singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge reevaluate his priorities and break the radio silence toward his bandmates.

"We started talking again after Travis' accident," the boyish DeLonge asserted with uncharacteristic somberness.

The co-frontman was seated in a backstage dressing room before the band performed on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" last month. His mouth trembled with emotion before he lapsed back into his default goofball mode. "There was some hate before then," he blurted out. "Don't make me cry!"

But rekindling the bromance that propelled Blink's potty-mouthed popularity as one of Southern California's unlikeliest arena rock acts required that DeLonge, Barker and bassist-vocalist Mark Hoppus put aside their personal differences and come together as creative equals.

"We had to be friends before we could be in a band again," said Barker.

Hoppus, 37, recalled the moment of satori that would result in Blink's resurrection.

"We were sitting in the courtyard of our studio one day," he said. "We had been hanging out for about eight weeks or something, just as friends. And it was like there was a giant elephant in the room. It was like when you're dating a chick for eight weeks. Tom asked me and Travis, 'Where is this going? Are we going to do this thing?' Blink was obviously such a huge thing in our lives. We realized we wanted to continue doing it."

He added: "Not only with a sense of what we brought to the table but an appreciation for what everyone else brought."

Who says the monolithic ticket-lords aren’t paying attention?

With the current economic climate taking an increasingly larger bite out of the concert business bottom line, Live Nation has been offering No Service Fee Wednesdays, when concert-goers can buy tickets to select shows without incurring those painful service fees that often discourage potential buyers from pressing the “send” button on expensive ticket orders.

On July 8, Live Nation will add even more incentive with All-In-One pricing for lawn tickets on Wednesdays, which throws in parking, a hot dog and a soda (on top of no services charges) all for only $29.99. Finally, the recession is working for fans of live music. There’s no word on a vegetarian option for those free hot dogs, though.

Tickets for the first edition of All-in-One Wednesday” (which includes shows from Blink 182 and Coldplay) go on sale at 12:01 a.m. PST on July 8 at www.LiveNation.com. Other concerts affected in the L.A. area include No Doubt (Aug. 4), Rock the Bells (Aug. 8), Toby Keith (Aug. 15) and more, including all shows at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine. 

-- Scott T. Sterling

Photo: Gwen Stefani. Credit: Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times

It might have been just another rote evening of late night TV talk show programming. But a funny thing happened at a taping of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in Hollywood on Tuesday. Blink-182 showed up to play a couple of songs -- an effort to drum up attention for the multi-platinum-selling pop-punk trio's North American stadium tour, which kicks off July 24 in Las Vegas.

And suddenly, a full-blown rock concert broke out.

In just their fourth public performance after a five-year "hiatus" as a group, guitarist-singer Tom DeLonge, bassist-singer Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker performed energetic run-throughs of two of Blink's biggest Warped Tour hits, "What's My Age Again?" and "Dammit" for Kimmel's cameras. Then, glancing at each other from across the stage with barely contained class clown glee, they decided they were having too much fun to leave.

You'd never have guessed that only a year ago the band mates hadn't recaptured that lovin' feeling toward each other, and a detente -- let alone a Blink-182 reunion -- seemed hopelessly out of reach. (An upcoming  story in The Times will shed more light on what brought them back together.)

"I love you. Travis," Hoppus drawled into the mike between songs, prompting DeLonge to elucidate for the crowd: "It's a physical thing."

"And I love you, Tom DeLonge," Hoppus continued, just before the trio launched into their single "Down."

With Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and wife Ashlee Simpson looking on from backstage, and flanked by a gaggle of the group's preteen children sitting on an overstuffed sofa, Blink performed eight songs (not including an off-the-cuff improv cover of the Beastie Boys' "High Plains Drifter") over the course of an hour. Among them: "Feeling This," "Dumpweed," "Reckless Abandon" and "Josie (Everything's Gonna Be Fine)."

"We haven't performed some of these songs in seven years," DeLonge said. "Expect us to screw them up!"

Blink-182 has been in the studio recording a new record, but don’t expect to hear the album on  tour this summer. The pop-punk band’s reunion trek hits the Los Angeles area on Sept. 17 in Irvine.

“I think that people want to hear the old stuff right now,” said bassist/singer Mark Hoppus. “I think that people want to relive the old times, and the people who haven’t seen Blink yet want to see the songs they’ve been listening to the past few years. We’ll throw in some new stuff, but this is about reforming as a band and playing the songs that we grew up playing.”

Hoppus, speaking at a party  at the Hollywood Mexican restaurant El Compadre to promote the tour, said Blink-182 is still signed to Interscope Records. Though the tour may be focused on old material, fans should rest assured that the band’s reunion trek, which also features Fall Out Boy and Weezer, is not to rehash the late ‘90s, when Blink-182 was a staple on mainstream rock radio with “Dammit (Growing Up)” and “What’s My Age Again?” The band will indeed hit the road with a new single in hand.

As to whether or not the new cut will be released as an official single before the tour begins in late July in Las Vegas -- that’s still up in there air.

Said Hoppus, “Intescope will be putting out our next record, but I don’t know if the song will be coming out as a release -- a for-sale version for the tour or not, or if we’ll just debut it for the tour and let it sit it in ... badly-played live editions.”

- On the day Green Day releases its second rock opera with "21st Century Breakdown" and hours before No Doubt kicks off a major summer tour, another veteran pop-punk band has announced its comeback tour dates.

Blink-182 will hit the Los Angeles area on Sept. 17 with a date in Irvine, reports Billboard. Yet those expecting to hear all the new songs that bassist/singer Mark Hoppus has been tweeting about may be a little out of luck. Blink-182's manager, Rick Devoe, cutely tells Billboard's Mitchell Peters that "the word on the street is that this tour is about the hits."

Also in Blink news, the band performed last night at a private party in Los Angeles (Pop & Hiss' invite musta got lost in the mail), and Idolator has one of the poorly-shot cellphone clips.

- Speaking of Green Day, those looking to buy a digital edition of the band's "21st Century Breakdown" (it's good, trust us) can choose between a $4.99 download on Amazon.com or a $14.99 download from Apples iTunes store. But the Amazon price appears to be one day only, so make your decision quick.

- Melinda Newman at HitFix spent some time palling around with "American Idol" vet Chris Daughtry this week (Pop & Hiss' invite musta got lost in the mail). She was on the set of the video shoot for his new single, "No Surprise." Daughtry performed the mid-tempo tune on "American Idol" this week, and it's already at No. 15 on the U.S. pop chart. Newman writes of the video shoot, "The scene resembles a cross between the moon, some kind of modern sculpture and the opening of "Casino Royale" where the Daniel Craig-era James Bond is fighting one of the bad guys and jumping from beam to beam."

-- Todd Martens

Photo: Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 performs in Los Angeles last night. Credit: Getty Images

Apparently making sure that no fans blinked and missed the announcement on last night's Grammy Awards telecast, the members of Blink-182 made it official this morning: They're reuniting and planning a new tour and album, with no specific timetable announced.

Here's the official statement:

"Hi. We're blink-182. This past week there’ve been a lot of questions about the current status of the band, and we wanted you to hear it straight from us. To put it simply, We're back. We mean, really back. Picking up where we left off and then some. In the studio writing and recording a new album. Preparing to tour the world yet again. Friendships reformed. 17 years deep in our legacy."

The San Diego punk trio last put out a new studio album, "Blink-182," in 2003. Just before announcing the rock album trophy for Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," singer Tom DeLonge, bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker, his arm still in a sling after a September plane crash, told Grammy watchers Sunday they were going to get together again. There was remarkably little immediate reaction from the crowd at Staples Center.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images