Fury, wails and extremes

On Sunday, the weekend-long Bamboozle Left festival in Irvine could not have been bookended by more different headliners: the ambient dirge metal band Deftones and the rapper 50 cent. Each had practically nothing to do with the festival’s bulk but worked equally well in their own ways.

The Deftones’ latherly fury and Chino Moreno’s ungodly wail were pitch perfect for wide spaces at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. 50 Cent bested expectations just by showing up on time, and even the most scene-bound bamboozlers have spent time with “I get money” and “P.I.M.P.” on OC freeways.

So the mood was by and large loose and festive, and even the interstitial gunshot noises were kept to polite minimums.

Meanwhile, at Saturday’s performance, Buddy Nielsen of the New Jersey punk band Senses Fail was not altogether thrilled about the festival’s lineup.

“It feels like we’re playing in a chocolate factory here, with all these bands looking like 7-Eleven candy,” Nielsen said. “What happened to this scene? It’s garbage.”

After that interlude, Senses Fail’s two guitarists promptly pointed their instruments skyward, kicked their feet up on the stage monitors and played dueling harmonized solos in the vein of Blue Oyster Cult. It just goes to show that what counts for modern punk rock today is anybody’s guess, and every stripe of it was on display at last weekend’s installment of Bamboozle Left. The two-day festival further proved that today’s emo scene is less determined by the music than by the kind of person who listens to it, and be it grindcore, doofusy stoner rap or frothy disco, every permutation of teenage taste was up for spirited debate.

Even the headlining Chicago band Fall Out Boy, which alongside Green Day is one of the only punk-allied bands to regularly top pop album charts today, was greeted with ravenous cheers and a few withering quips from curmudgeonly scene vets who looked to be around the ripe age of 20.

While bassist Pete Wentz has made tabloid rounds for marrying Ashlee Simpson and the birth of his son Bronx, the band’s recent album “Folie a Deux” is a swaggering and sonically ambitious LP that they did absolute justice to onstage. Drummer Andy Hurley enlivened earlier hits with some metal-worthy kick drum chops, and more recent cuts like “I Don’t Care” swung with a self-aware sass that would please T. Rex.

The earlier acts, however, were largely less impressive arguments for punk’s late bend toward preening eclecticism. The rapper Asher Roth, he of the undergrad hit “I Love College,” spent far less time actually rapping than praising marijuana and goofing off with his hype men (which actually means he’s been paying attention at today’s mainstream rap shows), while the ghastly nu-metal revivalists Hollywood Undead somehow managed to take the Korn formula and make it more inanely cartoonish and violently homophobic at once.

The swank techno-pop of local quartet Metro Station and the hook barrage of All Time Low fared a bit better on the main stages, and someone needs to make the L.A. band funeral party, with its liquid-liquid via-Tia Puente percussion jams, very famous very soon.

And the Kansas City quintet the Get Up Kids held down the obligatory and well-received old-dudes slot.

“I wouldn’t have made it through high school without an album like ‘Something to Write Home About,’” said Wentz, referencing the Get Up Kids’ 1999 breakthrough. For once, it was nice to see pop-punk fans finally agree on something.

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august.brown@latimes.com