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Live Reviews

Out: Beach Cops and Smart Cops team up for a punk patrol at the Rosebud

UP THE PUNX Ancient Filth brought their noise to Harvard Square.

The impossible happened on Saturday, June 30, in the back lounge of the Rosebud Diner in Davis Square – for one night, at least, cops and punks were one and the same. Smart Cops, from Rome, Italy, and Boston's Beach Cops pulled double duty in Somerville, alongside locals Ancient Filth and White Pages. The show opened with Beach Cops, a trio who augmented surfy riffs with sunglasses and patterned button-ups reminiscent of Hawaiian T-shirts. A fairly new band on the Boston circuit, Beach Cops patrolled the stage and played their surf-inspired punk with youthful enthusiasm — at one point offering the crowd a raucous cover of the Troggs' groovy 1960s rock anthem "Wild Thing."

White Pages, a lo-fi three-piece noise-punk outfit from Cambridge, performed a fast-paced set defined by Joe Sutton's voice, which is somewhere between a howl and an exclamation. Ancient Filth then took the show's energy to the next level — not easy for a band that hopped on the bill only a few days before the (filling in for Brooklyn's Ex-Humans, who dropped out). With the crowd fully primed, Ancient Filth delivered. Their singer let loose both onstage and amongst the crowd, screaming "Pushed to the limit/Pushed to the limit/How much pressure can you take?" The Rosebud crowd was willing to take quite a bit.

Roman punk import Smart Cops closed the show with style, taking the stage in matching uniforms: Smart Cops T-shirts and sleek leather jackets. They dressed the stage with flashing lights and peppered their performance with samples of police sirens, and played a solid set, singing in Italian, relieving the crowd of any obligation to sing along — or even understand — and just dance and thrash around. Usually a police presence at a punk show is unwelcome, but on this night it proved that maybe not all cops are bad.