Rx Bandits Bring "...And the Battle Begun" to Newport, 20 Years Later
Twenty years is a long time to keep an album alive. It's long enough for the fans who bought it new to have kids old enough to buy tickets themselves. Tonight, Jul 21, Rx Bandits roll into Newport Music Hall on the "...And the Battle Begun" 20th Anniversary Tour, with Catbite in support, and the whole thing is a reminder that some records don't just age — they harden into landmarks.
Rx Bandits were never a band you could file neatly. They came up through the ska world and then spent years refusing to stay there, blurring ska, prog, and post-hardcore into something that shouldn't cohere and somehow always did. The horns, the shifting time signatures, the songs that take hairpin turns two minutes in — it's the sound of a band that treated "genre" as a starting point rather than a fence. That restlessness is exactly why the 20th-anniversary framing lands. This isn't a nostalgia act coasting on a hit. It's a band revisiting the record where a lot of that ambition crystallized.
The 2006 album turning 20 is the occasion, and anniversary tours live or die on the room. Play a record like this in the wrong space and the intricacy gets swallowed. Play it somewhere that knows how to handle a loud, busy, dynamic band, and every horn line and tempo change gets to land. Which is why the Newport is the right call. This is a room that's spent decades hosting exactly this kind of act — big enough to feel like the event a 20th anniversary deserves, close enough that you can actually track what the band is doing up there when the arrangements get dense.
Catbite opening is the other reason to show up early. The Philadelphia crew brings a bright, propulsive ska-forward energy that sets the table without dulling the appetite — the kind of support slot that primes a crowd rather than just filling time before the headliner. On a night built around a band that came up through ska before wandering off into stranger territory, it's a fitting lineage to open the doors.
Here's what makes anniversary shows like this quietly special: they collapse time. For a couple of hours, the room holds both the people who found this record in 2006 and the ones who found it years later on a friend's recommendation, all of them singing the same parts. There's a particular kind of energy that only exists at a 20th-anniversary show — equal parts celebration and defiance, a crowd insisting that yes, this still matters, and a band getting to prove it with the songs cranked to full volume.
Rx Bandits have always had an audience that runs deep rather than wide — the sort of devotion you earn by making music that rewards close listening and repeat plays over the course of two decades. That's precisely the crowd that turns out for a night like this, and precisely why the Newport is a smart fit: a mid-size room where devotion translates directly into volume and heat.
The doors are open tonight and the record is 20 years old. If "...And the Battle Begun" was ever part of your rotation — or if you're the type who trusts a band that never once stayed in its lane — the room across from campus is where you want to be.
Two decades on, the battle's still worth showing up for.
Sources: Newport Music Hall setlists