Three decades is a long time to keep a ska-punk band on the road, particularly one that came up in the mid-’90s California scene without the commercial crossover that made some of their contemporaries household names for a few years and then left those same bands with narrower options. Mad Caddies, formed in Santa Ynez, California in 1995, plays Empire Underground on Tuesday, August 25 — a 6:30 p.m. show that puts their catalog, spanning punk rock, ska, reggae, dixieland, and jazz, into one of Albany’s more appropriately scaled rooms for that particular range of sounds.
About the Show
Mad Caddies arrives this summer on the touring cycle behind Arrows Room 117, their 2024 release, which follows Let It Go (2019) and House on Fire (2020), three records released since 2019 in a run of output that has kept pace with their road schedule. The band describes themselves as “actively touring after three decades in the music industry,” and the current itinerary reflects it. The ska-punk genre has contracted considerably since the wave that produced Mad Caddies and others in the mid-’90s California scene; a number of their contemporaries have dissolved, gone on extended hiatus, or settled into nostalgia-circuit bookings. The Caddies’ continued recording activity makes them a different proposition: not a reunion, not a greatest-hits lap, but a working band still adding to the catalog it tours.
The band’s own description of their sound, blending ska punk, reggae, punk rock, dixieland, and jazz into something “energetic, melodic, and unmistakably their own,” is also an argument for active touring over retrospective frames. Their site describes their merch as “road-tested gear” from the merch table, which is a small detail but one that captures how a band that’s been doing this since 1995 thinks about its relationship with audiences.
Venue & Logistics
Empire Underground sits at 93 N. Pearl St. in downtown Albany, operating under the Empire Live Albany umbrella and a reliable stop on the Capital Region‘s touring circuit. The club scale is a natural fit for a show built around the energetic, genre-spanning delivery that’s been Mad Caddies’ signature since the ’90s. For more details, visit the Empire Underground venue page. The show is Tuesday, August 25 at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets
No ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. Buy tickets