Over the course of 16 years and 6 studio albums, RX Bandits have crafted an instantly recognizable sound. Their blend of ska, punk, and progressive rock has won over an incredibly loyal fanbase, and their dynamic live show is one of the few places you can catch audiences moshing one second and dancing the next. The band’s last album, 2009’s ‘Mandala,’ saw them at the height of their instrumental prowess, showcasing Matt Embree and Steve Choi’s speedy, skittering guitar lines and drummer Chris Tsagakis’ fluid grooves.

Now, RX Bandits are nearing the end of their farewell tour and the beginning of an indefinite hiatus. Before one of the band’s shows in Boston, Chris was kind enough to speak with Rock Edition over the phone about the tour, the hiatus, and his future plans.

How’s it going?

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Sound Colour Vibration Interview

w/ Matt Embree and Chris Tsagakis of RX Bandits

On the edge of an indefinite hiatus, Rx Bandits are wrapping up a consistent schedule of touring with a string of summer shows. They are completing their summer tour in the place that birthed the band, Southern California. Having crafted a sound with foundations in rock, reggae, punk, and ska, Rx has evolved with every album and influenced many others in the process. With a slew of side projects (i.e. Matt Embree’s Love You Moon, Chris Tsagakis’ Technology, Embree and Tsagakis both in The Sound of Animals Fighting, Steve Choi in Machines, etc.), the group is looking to stretch new musical limbs while giving others time to rest. I sat down with longtime friends and musical partners Matt Embree (Vocals/Guitar) and Chris Tsagakis (Drums) to talk about collaborations, labels, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. -Zack Lazar

This tour has been blown a bit out of proportion. You guys said you were going on a break, and people started saying, “they’re over, this is the farewell tour!”. But really, isn’t it more like an indefinate hiatus.

Matt Embree: That’s what it is, a hiatus. We’re not breaking up.

Chris Tsagakis: We’ve been pretty consistent with touring for a long time.

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More with RX Bandits’ remarkable sticksman—profiled in April’s Gearing Up column—who smoothly covers the broad ground between So-Cal ska and blazing prog rock. - by Corrado Rizzi

It’s safe to say that you will never see RX Bandits drummer Chris Tsagakis play a song live the same way twice. Some of his parts certainly remain constant—his integral grooves, his cues to shift into a different section of a song. But, as Tsagakis tells MD, “I could be in the middle of the tour and hear a drummer or record that I’ve never heard before, and it will influence me to try something new. I kind of leave it open, so that as I grow as a drummer I just change up the fills. Whatever feels good at the moment, you know?”

In the mid-’90s, Southern California was a breeding ground for ska and the bands that pushed the genre into the mainstream. Tsagakis and his band have moved far from their Orange County beginnings over the course of half a dozen full-length albums, including their latest masterwork,Mandala. “We were pretty ska at first,” Chris says, “and we played with a lot of ska bands when the ska scene was pretty big. As we grew we tried to get out of that; we wanted to move on and be something different—but at the same time we didn’t want to just leave all of our fans behind.”

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A Weekend of RX Bandits: Preview

Andrew Phan (Pharmacy)

This weekend the RX Bandits will invade West Hollywood, selling out 3 straight nights at the famous Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. Each night, the Bandits will be performing one of their three most recent albums in its entirety.

In October, 2006 (my first semester in college) RX Bandits released …And The Battle Begun. To be honest, up until then I had only known them as ‘that ska/punk band from the Drive Thru samplers with the song about analog boys in a digital word’. What I heard blew that reputation out of the water. I was so incredibly wrong to think that Finch was the best thing Drive Thru had to offer when I was in high school. These guys weren’t stereotypical SoCal chill, mixing in wah-guitar upstrokes between horn and bass riffs. This was a band with raw energy and real messages channeling through their sounds. I needed more. The only way was to rediscover their back catalog. A certain former president of Tastemakers recommended that I start with the closing track on the band’s final release on Drive Thru, The Resignation. “Decrescendo” is anything but what the title suggests; it’s a supercharged opus that revolves around the sole lyrical refrain to transition from syncopated horn and guitar solos, hard-driving choruses, and an epic gang drum finale.

“Did you get what you wanted?”

Guitarist, Steve Choi looks back on the growth both he and the band have experienced since The Resignation was released in 2003.

“I’m living life as an artist. I’m living life as a musician. If I’m not refining and progressing and getting better, what am I? I’m dead.

“Each (album) is its own life achievement as itself. We all can distinctly remember the struggle and all the work. Each album is kind of its own scrapbook or yearbook. Pretty much every song has its own specific set of memories. I remember specifically the place I first wrote “Decrescendo” in the back of our tour bus in Brighton, England. We had the day off and we were right across from the beach and we were just sitting around and it was the end of a really long European tour…

“A lot of (singer) Matt (Embree)’s lyrics deal with social and political issues the past few years. Really where that comes from first is expressing ourselves more than it is trying to put out some sort of manifesto or what we think people should be doing. The only reason people may think that is because we say it with a voice more resolute and we say it in a way that can be interpreted as being preachy. But really that’s not where we’re coming from. I think part of what makes us US and part of what makes us progress naturally is focusing on who we are and where we are at the time.”

Drummer, Chris Tsagakis weighs in on the evolution of the band’s sound.

“We don’t necessarily have an idea of what the album is going to be or what we want it to be beforehand. We just do what we feel like doing at the moment and it turns out how it turns out.

“The writing and recording process was pretty much the same for all the albums. We try to write pretty much the same way every time we write the songs all together and we record live as much as we can. That’s the same for all the albums.

“A lot of our fans like our music because it is just what it is. It’s just a creative expression rather than a product. Since we’ve kept consistent with that, our fans seem to be consistently happy with each release as its own piece of artwork.

The band has previously played full album shows in New York and Boston.

“It’s fun to concentrate on just one album as a whole as the way we wrote it, playing it to be heard,” Tsagakis explains.

“If anything it really makes us feel really good,” Choi admits. “It really amplifies what amazing fans we have. Not to sound too cheesy or anything, but it’s true. The overwhelming response we get for the albums and how much support and excitement revolves around doing these performances. As flattering and exciting as that is, it’s really nerve racking…”

With fans coming from as far as Israel, Thailand, or Venezuela to see these shows, the anticipation has certainly mounted. Luckily, the band has been able to prepare for the weekend from the comfort of their own homes in Los Angeles.

“The last week and a half we’ve been practicing every day,” says Tsagakis. “Two days ago we started practicing with the horn players for The Resignation and ‘Battle.’ They knew the music but we had them come in a few days before the shows to get tight as a 6 member band again.”

Choi admits that he’s had some anxiety preparing for this weekend’s shows.

“Being holed up in our tour bus is definitely not as good for our health, but being on tour and playing shows every night really does help your conditioning and stamina for when you do these full album shows. They really do take a lot more stamina than a set that you put together.

“When you have that many people that stoked on you and you have that much energy being projected at you and they’re participating with you and you’re sharing this moment. You’d have to be really dead to not be really moved by that. It’s one of the most moving things I’ve ever experienced in my life and I think it’s one of the more moving things anyone can experience from the audience or from the stage.

“Just seeing all these stoked faces, seeing all these people that are so excited and sharing this with you, knowing that they appreciate something that you made so much, it’s so flattering and it’s such an honor. I won’t lie about it; it makes me feel really damn good. That’s definitely something I can say, on behalf of the band that we’re all looking forward to. We’re looking forward to…or attempting to put on the most stellar show that we can.”

I’ll be keeping you updated on tastemakersmag.com all weekend with a running diary of the all the happenings at the Troubadour.