Anniversary tours tend to fall into two camps. Some treat the occasion as a museum piece, a setlist frozen in the year the record dropped. Others use the milestone as a reason to show the music never sat still. RX Bandits landed firmly in the second camp at The Van Buren on June 13, bringing the twentieth anniversary of …And The Battle Begun to Phoenix with Maps & Atlases opening the night.
…And The Battle Begun arrived in 2006 as a pivot for the band. The ska foundations that defined their early run remained, but the record pushed further into progressive structure, dub weight, and jazz-leaning improvisation. Playing it two decades later doesn’t read as nostalgia. It reads as a reminder of how early the band stopped fitting into any single genre.
Matt Embree fronted the set the way he has for most of the band’s life, splitting attention between intricate guitar runs and a vocal delivery that climbs without strain. Behind him, Chris Tsagakis drove the arrangements from the kit, locking into a groove, dropping the floor out beneath it, then rebuilding it a few bars later. The horn section cut through in tight unison lines before scattering into the open instrumental stretches the band has always favored.
Those stretches are where RX Bandits separate themselves from a standard ska-punk bill. A brisk upstroke gives way to a slow dub crawl, which gives way to a guitar figure that climbs for the better part of a minute before the full band snaps back into place. The anniversary material anchored the set, and the crowd that filled the room came for the catalog as much as the headline.
Maps & Atlases opened with a set built for close listening. The Chicago band made its name on intricate, finger-tapped guitar work and odd-meter songwriting, an approach that set a fitting tone for a headliner that treats rhythm as something to bend rather than hold.
…And The Battle Begun holds up because the band never sanded down its stranger edges. Live, that restlessness reads as the opposite of a victory lap. RX Bandits didn’t come to Phoenix to look back. They came to show that the record was always aimed forward.
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Website: https://mapsandatlases.org
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Bandcamp: https://mapsatlases.bandcamp.com
