3 out of 5

Label: Pentimento

Producer: Tomas Kalnoky

We want our favorite artists to evolve; we want our favorite artists to stay the same.  It’s a tricky game that can easily trigger fans either calling the new album stale or saying – with a negative shake of head – that ‘they’ve changed.’

When Catch-22 proceeded without Tomas Kalnoky, we listened, but it was definitely a different group.  Kudos to those who kept going, but for me (and many others, I’d believe), Kalnoky was the frenetic glue that drove Keasbey Nights to become a ska-punk classic.  Snotty-spat angst mixed with bloody imagery and tells off fuckoffitude wrapped around blazing fast ska jams and drum fills that would break into hardcore slashes of distortion.  Streetlight Manifesto eventually emerged and it was just like a sharper version of Kalnoky-era Catch-22 – he’d taken the production to town, cleaning it up, tightening everything, and maturing a bit to be more cynical than snotty, but still telling the kind of stories we (I) wanted to hear about sad sacks and lost chances.  Long delays eventually came through with a second album, which seemed like a logical step forward – Kalnoky was aging, the lyrical themes showed it, and there wasn’t such a need to extend tracks into a 5+ minute wasteland to, maybe prove musical legitimacy.

Another long wait and we have ‘The Hands That Thieve.’  It is – hands down – the most impressively arranged and executed ska/punk album I’ve heard in quite a while, and most certainly the most effortlessly complicated thing Kalnoky has worked on.  His usual bag of structural tricks and gang vocals are here, but he bends the formula in such amazing ways – opener ‘The Three of Us’ is an easy example, as the song mutates through different portions which could be entirely different songs but perfectly bleed together.  Elsewhere Tomas steps away from the strict ska/punk scripture and, maybe, brings in some of the playfulness he get to employ with the 99 Songs cover album, turning in some riffs and tunes that are more casual, more folky, more rock-oriented, or on a couple great occasions, balls to the wall punk (‘Ungrateful’), which he’s sort of avoided since Catch-22.

And yet…

Those changes lean the group away from the intensity and anger that made them such a highlight.  I loved that Kalnoky would string together these intelligent and passionate narratives that were so gloom and doom; it’s not that things are outright happy on Thieve, but they’re generally not as pissed.  Sometimes this can still turn out a great story – the cynical man becoming the tired older man, such as on ‘Toe to Toe’ – but often it stops short of anything really effective and goes for wistful, themes of family and memories spoken of with contemplation and not frustration.  I get it, Kalnoky’s getting older, it gets tough being pissed all the time, and this is equally reflected in that expanded musical palette I suppose.  But it’s the strange line for me between stale and change – this is a change that makes the disc not as capable of getting me amped up, despite the impressive playing.  To be fair, Streetlight’s previous discs have allowed for these elements, but the ratio was important, this bittersweet stuff only peeking its head into a couple tracks.  Here it’s the overwhelming majority, only a scattered 3 or 4 songs out of 10 feeling like Kalnoky could muster up some bluster to shout about something.

I suspect time will treat this well, as it’s eminently listenable, but upon first impression (first week’s, as I kept putting this on rotation to get a feel), I feel like I lost another bitter voice to the malaise of ‘maturity.’