Rx Bandits
Mandala
Sargent House Records

4 / 5
Rx Bandits has been a band notoriously known for their steady evolution. What originally started over a decade ago as a third-wave ska revival act playing under the name of “The Pharmaceutical Bandits” founding members Matt Embree and Chris Tsagakis have found a niche of progressing into a different sound with each subsequent release. The band’s sixth album marks another step in that saga. With the departure of Steve Borth, who handled Saxophone duties, the band returned to record Mandala with a slim-and-trimmed four-man lineup.

What follows is a record capitalizing further on the experimental force of 2006′s …And The Battle Begun, taking cues from the band’s esoteric side project, The Sound of Animals Fighting. Chock full of eccentric time signatures, hypnotic guitar riffs and poignant booming bass all backed by possibly the best drummer in today’s scene, Mandala is a force of illuminating prowess.

The Bandits have always been known for their extremely talented musicianship. Listening through Mandala can be a tiring experience at first, delving through change-up verses, fastball choruses and intertwining interludes it’s hard to imagine Embree and co doing it live, but they did. In fact, Mandala and it’s two predecessors were both recorded as a live band directly to tape. In a world where so many bands use pro-tools, auto-tune and so many other techniques to serve up a polished product, it’s refreshing to hear a band content with the little mistakes, giving the album a feel of genuine sincerity.

For fans of the band’s most recent work, Mandala will sit just fine. With tracks like “Hope Is A Butterfly, No Net It’s Captor” and the album opener “My Lonesome Only Friend” trekking in the path of cerebral progressive-rock, Mandala at times sounds very similar to it’s predecessor. That is not to say that it is …And The Battle Begun redux. With the aforementioned departure of Borth, guitarist Steve Choi has been left to flourish many of Mandala’s tracks with atmospheric keyboard, which gives a lot of the record a more experimental feel. Tracks like “Breakfast Cat”, “Mietras La Veo Sonarr” and “It’s Only Another Parsec” capitalize on Rx Bandits signature sound melded with hints of The Sound of Animals Fighting’s latest, keeping it accessible and listener friendly.

The ruckus created in the beginning and ending of Mandala create a thick sandwich for the middle section of the record which explores a much more reserved sound reminiscent of Matt Embree’s solo project Love You, Moon. Both “White Lies” and the live-show-interlude converted to full song “March Of The Caterpillar” diversify Mandala even further, slowing things down a bit before kicking into full gear for the finale. “Bring Our Children Home or Everything Is Nothing” is a bombastic closer, intent on voicing it’s political choir in epic and effectively emotional fashion closing Mandala on it’s definitive high point.

While Mandala might not take the giant leap of progression found on …And The Battle Begun, it still finds the band in a place of steady contentment. The energy and the flow is all we have come to expect from a band of such stature, and it does well serving as the next chapter in Rx Bandit’s already impressive story.
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