Kevin Bronson on February 14th, 2015

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Los Angeles can be surreal like this. One minute you’re agonizing over which big theater show you’d like to attend on Friday night, and the next you’re blowing them all off so you can see the Weddoes play a downtown ranchero bar.

For the uninitiated, “the Weddoes” is the endearment bestowed upon U.K. stalwarts the Wedding Present, formed 1985, the indie-rock pioneers whose sometime-jangling, sometimes-abrasive guitar assault, coupled with mastermind David Gedge’s prickly observations on love, lust, betrayal and jealousy, have endured over the course of eight full-length albums, a handful of EPs and more than 30 singles.

That Gedge, a part-time Santa Monica resident, and his current lineup would convene at La Cita — the venerable downtown bar where cultures regularly collide (in any given week, you can hear rock, punk, dance, reggae and cumbia music there) — was, to cop the title of the Wedding Present’s second album, “Bizarro.” “This might be the smallest venue I’ve played in 30 years,” Gedge said drolly, noting it might be “a totally inappropriate bar, but I’m sure it will be great.”

The gig was staged by Michael Stock, the promoter/DJ/indie savant behind the popular weekly club Part Time Punks. Stock explained that he woke up one morning to find an email from Gedge, who wanted to play an L.A. date. Unavailable for Part Time Punks’ regular Sunday night affairs, the Wedding Present instead were steered to La Cita.

After changing owners almost a decade ago, La Cita remains wonderfully unchanged from its roots as a Mexican bar — and the tricky part is that the stage, backed as it is by a mural of a matador and a bull, is built for mariachi bands. It’s only about 18 feet wide and 4 feet deep, so it’s a tight squeeze even for a standard four-piece rock band. “It’s not really set up for multiple guitar changes, is it?” Gedge noted in good humor as he swapped guitars with his tech by passing them over the drummer’s head.

The show’s only hiccup was the first 60 seconds, when the vocal and bass channels remained silent during the opening verse of 2005’s “Interstate 5” (from the brilliant album “Take Fountain,” released 10 years ago today). A switch was flipped, and the rest of the Wedding Present’s career-spanning and sweat-inducing 75 minutes sounded glorious.

The band’s 18 songs focused heavily on first-era Wedding Present. The band released its first five albums between 1987 and ’96 before going on hiatus while Gedge fronted the band Cinerama. “Interstate 5” marked the return of the Weddoes.

Included in the set were some of the singles that charted in the U.K. in the early ’90s — “Brassneck,” “Blue Eyes,” “Flying Saucer” and “Dalliance.” “Crawl,” from the 1990 EP produced by Steve Albini, made an appearance, as did “Suck” and “Heather” from 1991’s “Seamonsters.” Early on, there was a nifty bit of connecting the dots; 1986’s “You Should Always Keep in Touch With Your Friends” was followed by 2014’s “Meet Cute.”

And there were two new songs, “Kill Devil Hills” and “Fifty-Six,” both of which necessitated lyric sheets taped to the railing at the front of the stage. Gedge prefaced the first, a dissonant rocker, by explaining he might have trouble reading the lyrics in the dim light of the stage, “so if this goes to a long instrumental section, you’ll know why.” He negotiated that with aplomb, and, later, “Fifty-Six” (thanks to a railbird who shone her cell phone flashlight on the lyrics the whole song). The latter song begins gently, with Gedge waxing tenderly about the touch of his amour’s skin, the warmth of her caress and the smell of her hair before building into a raging bit of shoegazing.

Openers Sea Lions, playing as a trio, did a 30-minute set that fit perfectly with the headliners’ sonic lineage.