The Toasters play Maxines Thursday night.

  • The Toasters play Maxine’s Thursday night.

THE TOASTERS
8 p.m. Maxine’s. $8 adv., $10 door.

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Do you have, somewhere amongst the forgotten flotsam of your youth, a dusty old shoebox from Nineteen-ninety-something that you painted a black and white checkered pattern on? Is it full of worn-out Specials or Mighty Mighty Bosstones cassettes, a Ben Sherman button-up shirt, skinny tie, porkpie hat and maybe a pair of suspenders? Did your friend you haven’t seen in 12 years recently upload some scanned photos to Facebook of you skanking it up to Reel Big Fish at the 1996 Warped Tour in Kansas City? In other words, do you have any ska-letons in your closet?

Ouch. Sorry. I tried, but I just couldn’t finish writing this without including at least one terrible ska pun. I guess they’re not really even puns, more just the replacement of some syllable in a word with “ska,” no matter how much of a stretch. Why do ska bands do that? I can’t figure it out. The practice seems to date back to the very beginning of the genre, with The Skatalites, the original ska act that emerged from the Jamaican scene in the 1960s. So while New York City ska-lwarts The Toasters weren’t the first ones to do that, with their 1987 album “Skaboom,” they were likely among the first to engage in this practice.

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Anyways, The Toasters have been at it for nigh on three decades now, hence the band’s ongoing 30th Anniversary Tour. Ska Brewing Co. of Boulder, Colo., which is an actual real thing, has even created a Toasters 30th IPA to commemorate the occasion. Fusing Second Wave Two-Tone ska with punk rock, The Toasters were one of the bands that kicked off what’s generally referred to as the Third Wave of ska, which has been going on for quite some time now.

The opening act is The Last Slice, a Third Wave/Two-Tone hybrid that hails from Tulsa, Oklahom-ska. Sorry, sorry, couldn’t help it.

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