Everything’s got to start somewhere…right?

Somewhat surprisingly, this is the best quality version I could find.

My usual practice is to write reviews after my very first listen of an album, so that my most raw initial reactions are the ones I share. It’s by no means a perfect system, but it’s definitely a faster one than listening over and over and picking apart the finicky details like an actual music critic might do. In today’s case, I’m only partially breaking my rule. I’ve been absolutely in love with Streetlight Manifesto and basically any Tomas Kalnoky project for a few years now, gobbling up any content I can get my hands on. The songs on this particular demo are songs I’ve heard countless times (to the point where I know not only know the lyrics but the brass lines as well), but the demo itself, surprisingly, is somehow completely new to me. I’ve never heard these particular iterations and after a recent vinyl release by parent group Pentimento Music Company, it seems high time to give Streetlight Manifesto’s 2002 demo a go.

Hey look, it’s the entire demo! How convenient.

Due to my particular intimacy with these tunes already, my immediate impression was entirely on the track mixings themselves. Kalnoky is an infamous perfectionist — to the point of delaying Streetlight albums by several years — and the difference between raw inexperience and polished production are apparent. The demo doesn’t sweat the small details (probably due to lack of time/budget as much as novice designers) — sax keys click, errant notes flounder, voices crack and clash — but it makes the tracks seem less harnessed or processed. I can’t help noticing the same about the earlier Catch 22 version of the record Keasbey Nights and Streetlight’s eventual re-tooling of the same record — there’s something about the rough-around-the-edges that I appreciate so much more. It’s almost like Kalnoky fixes everything a little too much, and I’m surely impatient enough to prefer quantity over quality of product.

“Everything Went Numb” — hardcore fans of both band and genre have a hard time classifying Streetlight Manifesto as ska. I hate touching those arguments, but this track gives a rapid case study in why.

With that being said, I really don’t think Kalnoky as a songwriter or Streetlight Manifesto as a group could ever really release something low quality. Case in point: “Everything Went Numb” has no right to be a good song. As admitted in the liner notes of the record, it’s an erratic mishmash of lyrical and musical themes conceived in distant bits and pieces that somehow still coalesce into a greater sum than its parts. There’s something curiously relatable in the lyrics (at least to me), even if they deal with subject matters that you typically wouldn’t encounter in everyday life — say, robbing a bank tied to recognizing an action’s point of no moral return. Another example of Streetlight’s proficiency includes “Point/Counterpoint”, a track that Kalnoky wrote in his teenage years and absolutely hates now. The song is rife with cartoonish imageries of death and debate, but taking the lyrics at face value and dissecting the musical constitution underneath is so much more worthwhile. The contrapuntal progression (I might be misremembering the definition of this term but it sounds cool so it stays) of “Point/Counterpoint” is so incredibly satisfying that thematic cliches are hardly even noticed. The entire song feels like it could be performed by two bands of identical composition, each playing the meandering and intertwining parts that smash together for the frenetic choruses. Even the horns on the record are peculiarly clean. I’ve heard album after album of gimmicky ska bands with sky-high production budgets whose brass lines end up sounding whiny, flat and just blah, but somehow (especially considering the demo was recorded in a fucking basement) these horns come out crisp and present. Obviously I’m heavily biased but this band, this band, man. It boggles my mind.

“Point/Counterpoint” — Originally written as a slow acoustic duet, the touch-and-go between the intended participants is easily my favourite part of the album.

All ego-stroking aside, I think the most unique aspect of Streetlight Manifesto that is especially prevalent in the songs on the demo is their ability to make me turn emotional cartwheels. The songs aren’t inherently happy at all — robbing banks, murdered little girls, and wishing death to vilify another’s actions being typical subject matter — but there’s an incredibly endearing knack that the group has of steering the audience towards finding their own respective joys hidden within and subsequently dancing along like an idiot. Even though Kalnoky has a nasty habit of writing in a whiny us-little-guys-vs.-the-world mentality (which is throbbingly obvious in these few songs), the context of listening really strips away that feeling. You can read and analyze the lyrics all you want, but Streetlight’s performance responds to the angst and misery by developing individual tracks into a joyous triumph (or at least predicate the eventual coming of the same) so that the shitty feelings don’t stick around for long enough. Before you really know it, you’re back to violently prancing about like a moron instead – in the greatest way a moron can dance, of course.

Verdict: I’ve lost count of how many people claim to owe this band their lives and while the magic doesn’t totally come out until their full-lengths, I think this demo delineates the starting point of something special.