2 out of 5

Label: Pentimento

Producer: Tomas Kalnoky

I know, I’m horrible.  I’m a total Kalnoky devotee, so what’s wrong with me?

(As I write this, scouring the CD booklet for info, despite ordering direct from the label I’m seeing that I got stiffed on liner notes since my book has a misprint, the cover and back cover being reprinted instead of the first and last page.  BALLS!)

So coming out post Catch-22 and pre-Streetlight, the obnoxiously abbreviated BOTAR was definitely a preview of things to come… especially considering reworked versions of several of these acoustic tracks would show up on SM’s debut album.  Part of my rating, I admit, must suffer because I heard this after that disc, and so what’s here can’t help but feel like a training ground for Streetlight.  Even though Kalnoky maintains a separate identity for the groups, he’s still the songwriter and mixer and producer here, so certainly there’s something to that feeling.  He also fractures the impact of his return to music (because we all were desperate for more after Keasbey Nights) by including a Catch-22 reworking.  Slightly different lyrics, sure, but it’s the same song.  Thus are we assaulted from both sides with memories, of what came before and what came after (obviously the ‘after’ memory is where the bias comes in), with little room for BOTAR to have its own real niche.  Maybe accounting for why its been 10-plus years without a release…?

‘A Call to Arms’ has a somewhat tired little, ahem, manifesto on its inside cover, and all the artwork points to a ‘revolution’ of sound.  This isn’t so far away from Kalnoky’s regular themes, of course, but the pretty typical ska/punk (acoustic or not, slow intro to some tracks or not, that’s what it ’tis) tracks are still a bit away from the, double ahem, call to arms found in the lyrics of Streetlight’s debut, the songs here tailing on some ‘Keasbey’ woe is me concepts and lightly mixing it with the fervor of what was to come.  Or maybe the words are there but the energy not quite.  Because plugged in guitars suit Kalnoky.  These tracks sound rich, but the brass has a muted tone to it, like Tom’s mimicking his idols Squirrel Nut Zippers.  Fine, but their old-timey sound isn’t punk, and Tom can’t help but scream it out.

After about a billion spins I still can’t say exactly why this disc doesn’t inspire the way it seems like it should.  All of the tracks sound like Kalnoky.  But the feeling that this is but an echo of something else haunts the disc… even prior to Streetlight, the 5-song EP feels like a half-step.  Let’s pretend a BOTAR disc had followed this – certainly it would have expanded on these things, making ‘A Call to Arms’ still a minor note.  As a statement of intent, it’s actually fairly typical ska.  Does that knock it below 3 stars?  Well, I never find myself listening to the thing.  The 9 billion instrument ensemble seems like a great overkill match for Kalnoky’s style, but it mostly gets lost behind the core horns, guitar, drums and voice that drive Streetlight to awesome extremes.  If nothing else of the man existed, I’m sure this would make it into my rotation more frequently.  But ‘else’ does exist, and so it’s hard to go back to BOTAR’s lil’ debut.