The curious case of the Rx Bandits
By Justin Cox

Most bands spend their entire careers dreaming of a major record deal. The Rx Bandits spent the better part of a decade trying to get out of theirs. 

Their career has in many ways played out in reverse: Right out of high school the young ska band was signed to Drive Thru Records, which was bought by MCA. Seven years and four albums later, at the height of their popularity, the band severed ties with the label (with one album left on their contract) so they could produce and release their music independently.

Free from that “woefully disastrous recording contract” with Drive Thru, they went on to release their fifth album, …And the Battle Begun, themselves, with distribution help from Sergeant House records, an indie label that also represents Omar Rodriguez Lopez of the Mars Volta. According to the Rx Bandits bio, “as the band’s music rapidly matured, its label didn’t – leading to many years’ strife and struggle to stick to their guns and release the music they wanted.”

The jump from Drive Thru has unshackled them as a band and freed them to write their own future.

“This isn’t some sort of pioneering concept,” guitarist Steve Choi says. “The ideals we go for are for the greater good of musicians and creativity in general. It’s about separating it from that drug of marketing and corporate structure. There are many other people and bands that share the same concept.”

Earlier this year the band released their sixth album, Mandala, which touches on a range of styles including jazz, punk and metal, often within the same four-minute songs. You can hear the grooves of the Police and the clamor of At the Drive-In almost simultaneously. It’s danceable, yet spastic. Melodic, yet chaotic.

More is captured on tape than just sound

Like their last two albums, Mandala was recorded live, which is rare nowadays; most rock bands record one instrument at a time, which allows for easy touching up in post production.

There is more captured on tape than just notes and melodies, singer and guitar player Matt Embree say . Recording live allows those human elements to creep in.

“When you’re all playing together, it’s not just sound; its vibe,” he says. “You get vibe, you get emotion, you get all the things that are going into it, because it’s four human beings.
 
“When you take a drum track, record to a click and then you chop it up perfectly and use sound replacer to make everything even, and then one dude records a guitar part and they loop the choruses and then homeboy goes and records his fuckin’ vocals and you snap everything to the grid, it’s like, dude, it was at one point human, but not anymore.”

Embree says many producers nowadays don’t even know how to record a live band.

“It’s a dying art,” he says. “I know engineers who don’t even know how to set up room mics. They don’t know how to take a mic and walk around until it sounds good, which is the absolute art of the engineers I looked up to from the ‘60s and Motown, and the Beatles and Hendrix and, you know, Eddie Kramer. Those guys, that’s what they did. They took a mic and they walked around until it sounded good.”

Recording all of the instruments at once allows the band members to feed off one another as the song unfolds. Each take is different and no recording is “perfect.”

“On some songs we open the door to the amp room so that the amps will just bleed all over the drums,” Embree says. “So you’ve got a roomy guitar sound on the overhead drum mics, but we don’t have to worry about that because we’re not going to edit anything. If we play it right, it just sounds like people in a room.”

This approach has defined their live shows as well. Rarely do their instruments go silent between songs, as almost every track is woven into the next with a free-form jam. Often times these last longer than the songs themselves.

“We’re constantly improvising,” Embree says. “Even within the confines of the song, so we don’t always know what we’re doing.”

Six-albums of evolution

It’s hard to tell where the teenage ska band ends and the now-hornless prog-rock band begins, but the evolution is best illustrated in their crowds. The pit at an Rx Bandits show is like a mirror, pointed back in the direction of the band on stage. In it, the band’s past and present dance alongside one another.

Few progressive rock or punk crowds sway and dance like that of the Rx Bandits. Remnants of their ska foundation exist in both the band and the people who listen to their music. Their pit is a melting pot of newcomers, longtime listeners and everyone in between, all of which came to the band at a distinct point in the six-album evolution.

“By now in our career, people realize we don’t have a formula,” Choi says. “Bands tend to start putting out records where they’re just covering themselves. The day we do that is the day we quit.”

The lack of a horn section is not immediately obvious on the new album; the brass has been increasingly subtle in their music for years. Even though their last few albums featured trombone and trumpet, they rarely dove into Reel Big Fish-style horn romps. The horns were usually used in the style of meandering guitars or keyboards, trickling along in the background or accenting a song’s rhythm.

Consume, rape, pillage, move on

A few weeks before Mandala’s release last July, the album was leaked to the Internet. In response, the band made the album available for download on Amazon.com for just $2.99 a week before its scheduled release. Thanks in part to the low price; it reached No. 1 on the site’s Bestselling MP3 Albums on July 16. Also in response to the leak, Choi posted a blog encouraging fans to support the band. 

"You know we aren't the band who will have massive amounts of money from a faceless label to put into marketing and advertising our new record. You won't see us buy our way on the front page of myspace, or on a tour sponsored by rockstar caca-drinks. This is not 'holier than thou'... This is the story of a real band, with real guys just trying to survive solely off of playing music without selling too much of themselves…

“This is the path of our band, and by no means are we alone on it. As participants in the musical world I hope you know where you stand in this equation, because you are a good majority of it. Determining whether or not we as musicians are weekend hobbyists, or life-long committed artists.”

When asked about the blog, Choi compares support for indie artists to sustainable farming.

“Are you going to just clear cut something?” he says . “Use it up because you enjoy it without thinking about the byproducts or the consequences of the thing that creates it, a.k.a. the land, a.k.a. the forest, a.k.a. the people that make the music you like. Or are you just going to consume, rape, pillage and move on and be like, ‘Oh that band was cool while they were around’?”

“And think, ‘Oh, I wonder why that band’s not around anymore. Oh wait, I never went to any of their shows or bought any of their records,’” Embree adds .

“Sometimes people have fucked-up perceptions,” Choi says . “They don’t realize we’re a working band. Maybe sometimes they see a tour bus in front of a club and they see us play in front of hundreds of people and they think were rich and drive around in Benzes.”

“By buying a record from a band on an indie label, you are literally putting food in their mouths,” Embree cuts in. “That money is going to get split up between the band members and they’re going to go to Trader Joes or whatever and they’re going to buy food and they’re going to put it in their mouth.

“People like [Justin] Timberlake and those cats , like, it’s okay if you steal his record; it doesn’t matter. That fool’s probably making 10 percent off it anyways, which is going to his manager. And that dude’s making a million a show,” he continues. “

But if it’s an independent label, literally, that money goes to us. And we pay rent.”

“Just don’t listen to fuckin’ Metallica when they’re sitting there bitching about bullshit,” Choi adds. “Those dudes are full of shit.”