Everything Goes Dumb, Part 1: A Retrospective On Streetlight Manifesto’s 2003 Debut Album
Every so often, I’ll try and hunt down something on my iPod that I don’t listen to anymore as a way to seek some small thrill out of re-occupying a headspace I haven’t been in since my late teens. I’ve got one of those colossal, 160 gigabite iPods from the mid 2000s and I try not to delete anything off it if I can help it, so I’ve got a lot to work with.
The one artist I tend to give a pretty WIDE berth to is Streetlight Manifesto, since I was deeply and embarrassingly into them when I was in high school, and felt a deep, deep connection to one Tomas Kalnoky’s lyrics. I don’t think I always knew that Streetlight Manifesto wouldn’t be in the bands I really “took forward” into my adult stages of development, but I had to listen for myself to see whether or not they’d truly aged as terribly as I figured they had.
The good news is that there are parts of this album I don’t find dumb and embarrassing, and I was surprised to learn this! The bad news is that the parts of this album that are dumb are extremely dumb.
Hey Alex, some of us didn’t spend our entire adolescence being bad at World of Warcraft and watching too much anime: what the heck is Streetlight Manifesto’s deal?
I’m. so. glad. you. asked! Streetlight Manifesto is a third wave ska band formed in New Jersey in 2002. Its frontman, Tomas Kalnoky, was previously the songwriter for another third wave ska band, Catch 22, but he’d left that band back in 1998, a good 8 years before Catch 22 would go on to write a concept album about the Russian Revolution.
If you’re a little lost about the general concept of “ska punk,” it’s basically the two-tone of the 1970s and 1980s if it was played by a bunch of band geeks who didn’t know any people of color. Aside from maybe… one standout who has since moved away from ska entirely it’s not a great genre.
Everything Goes Numb was the first album Tomas Kalnoky and several other members of Catch 22 recorded as the band Streetlight Manifesto, and it came out in 2003 to pretty impressive acclaim (if Wikipedia is to be believed). It’s 55:12 of music spread across 12 tracks (that’s an average track time of 4:36 unless my math is wrong, putting most of the songs squarely in the “long for no reason” camp, but more on that later) and its major themes seem to revolve around botched bank heists, suicide (in the mildest, blandest, least relatable sense) and so many accusations of phoniness that even Holden Caulfield would probably tell them to cool it if he were real.
All right, I’ve stalled long enough, so let’s dive right into this damn turkey of an album.
The Song-By-Song Review
Track 1 — Everything Went Numb (3:29): If you’re not familiar with Streetlight’s sound, at least listen to the first 30 seconds of this track, which will give you a good idea of what we’re working with. For those of you who are not so inclined, here’s the scoop: this song begins with about 30 seconds of what I can only describe as three saxophones honking about in a toneless cacophony, before a muted trumpet comes in to “save the day” with some bullshit, slower “Flight of the Bumblebee” riff. It sucks a lot to listen to and I’m deeply embarrassed that I performed this song at a high school talent show when I was 17.
It’s also extremely shocking to me that critics praised the lyrics to this album given that Kalnoky rushes through them so fast in this song so as to render them unintelligible, but here’s the basic gist: the speaker is singing about a guy who’s participating in a bank heist but, oh no! It all goes wrong and the cops show up. This is how you can tell this was written by a bunch of white suburbanites, because their conception of what a bank robbery is fossilized in the 1920s where a bunch of white dudes in suits rolled up on a bank and knocked it over.
We can skip over the bulk of the lyrics but there’s one in particular I want to draw your attention to, and it comes during what can only be described as the bridge? I guess? It’s hard to tell because this song is like two bad, short songs duct taped together in order to make a longer one that’s even worse, but I’m getting off track. Anyway here’s the lyric:
Right and wrong
There’s not a lot a difference when you’re singing that poor man’s song
I hate to break it to Streetlight but Bruce Springsteen wrote this s0ng like 21 years ago and it was called “Atlantic City” and it whips ass. It takes a lot of arrogance to think you can do something better than The Boss.
As a last note, this is the first song on the album to mention the word “numb,” bringing the official Streetlight Manifesto “Numbness” Menchies (Mentions) to a stately 1.
Track 2—That’ll Be The Day (4:41): This track starts off with this super bad nü-metal, overdriven opening and then moves into a slightly more tolerable brass section, but the guitars are (according to my notes) “still an overly choppy mess,” which is what happens when you try to apply the rhythms of two-tone to the tempo of pop punk.
This is the second type of Streetlight Manifesto song there is: vague condemnation of a person or institution, or perhaps a person meant to be a stand-in for an institution. It’s basically catnip for shiftless suburban teens who don’t have a good grasp on their feelings or know their asses from Adam, which explains why I was so into this album when I was in high school.
I don’t think this song is as bad as “Everything Went Numb” but that might just be because I overcorrect on the first track because I liked it so much when I was in high school. That doesn’t stop it from having this super weird breakdown/bridge power chord disaster about 2:40 in, which is again a huge issue with this album and third wave ska in general which is that they write these extremely schizophrenic songs that lurch in between several musical genres, which has the unintended consequence of making these songs seem a lot longer than their already unearned 4 and a half minute play times.
Track 3—Point/Counterpoint (5:27): I’ll level with you—I think parts of this song are still pretty fun. Maybe it’s just an inability to shake off the cobwebs, but I will say that this song is at least “okay” at points, as opposed to the previous two songs, which I find to be unpleasant to hear with my ears and incredibly disjointed.
That said, this is the second song on the album that sort of posits this back-against-the-wall cinematic last stand that could only be concocted by a person who has experienced nothing but the lowest stakes imaginable (being in a third wave ska band) imagining what the highest stakes could possibly be (apparently dying from a gunshot wound? I don’t know, the imagery of this song is super mixed).
If you’re at all familiar with third wave ska, this song’s pretty well-known for its opening, and starts with a line that I basically used some permutation of as the opening for every short story I wrote from the year 2007 to 2011:
I’ve got a gun in my hand, but the gun won’t cock
My finger’s on the trigger but that trigger seems locked
And I can’t stop staring at the tick tock clock
And even if I could I would never give up
With a vest on my chest, a bullet in my lung
I can’t believe I’m dying with my song unsung
And if and when I die won’t you bury me alone
Cause I’ll never get to heaven if I’m singing this song
High school and college Alex was a sucker for fatalistic Tarantino bullshit so it’s no surprise that I thought the opening to this song was just about the most engaging thing I’d ever heard. For the record, I’m still extremely stupid and susceptible to shit like this, I’m just more paranoid about being emotionally manipulated by media.
So okay, I think the parts of this song that work work in spite of how overwrought this opening is, so “Point/Counterpoint” of course manages to spite my dumb ass by making that intro the chorus, meaning you hear it about three more times and sped up so as to basically reduce them to Kalnoky singing “wab blab blah blab blah blab blah blah blab blah blah” over and over again.
Additionally, the song gets its title from another line in the song, which I think reflects pretty badly on the story that this song attempts to spin for us, the listener:
And every time she makes a point, I make a counterpoint
She said it’s easy but in the end you’ll have no choice
And you know that’s only just the way that it goes
This isn’t the most egregious of the too-clever aphorisms and sophomoric intellectual dodges, but it just seems weird to me that this song is mentioning like “having an argument” in the pre-chorus of a song with a chorus that’s ostensibly about a dying man either attempting to kill himself before he can be apprehended or making a last stand against…something.
If you think everything else I’m saying here is bunk… fine, okay. But the one thing I want to get across that I do think is important is that Streetlight Manifesto’s view and attitudes towards death are extremely erratic in this album in a way that never occurred to me while I was a fan—suffice it to say that we won’t get into the minutiae of this in this part, but they both want to have their cake and eat it by insisting that dying can be alternatively cool as hell and still like The Greatest Tragedy, and these are split pretty clearly along gender binaries.
Other than that there’s some super schmaltzy line about our speaker doing whatever it is he came to do before yelling “Fuck it! Thank You! I love you all!” which probably seemed really cool to me when I was 16 but now just seems flippant and dumb in the extreme. Onto the next one.
Track 4—If And When We Rise Again(4:19): So “Point/Counterpoint” is a big dumb mess that manages to at least still be a little fun to listen to, but the same cannot be said of this track, which occupied a similar spot to “That’ll Be The Day” in high school Alex’s book—that spot being tracks on this album I felt obligated to skip if I just wanted to hear the hits.
I don’t have a lot to say about this one, but it starts with about a minute of buildup, which is an unconscionable waste of musical real estate given this song is already over 4 minutes long. Then that intro fades out and they start playing a totally different song, so what the hell was the point of the intro if you’re just going to throw it in the damn garbage like that?
“If And When We Rise Again” is pretty much just like if you asked a bunch of band geeks and theater twerps to describe what kind of song they’d want to hear, and it also nets us our second mention of the phrase “everything goes numb,” bringing the Streetlight Manifesto “Numbness” Menchies (Mentions) to 2.
The reason I say this is a song for band geeks is because after putting in the absolute bare minimum of effort into writing a song, we get 30 seconds of the tune to “Hungarian Dance №5 in G Minor” by Brahms before the song ends. No one is impressed that you can play Brahms, Streetlight Manifesto. You could have cut a minute and a half off of this song and you chose not to, which isn’t surprising given the guy who wrote all the songs was the album’s producer.
Next week, we’re gonna dig into the central meat of this album, which contains three of my favorite songs from when I was still a Streetlight superfan. Get excited, because it’s going to get extremely dumb.