Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Toh Kay - Streetlight Lullabies

I fear that touring with Reel Big Fish all the time has had a negative effect on Tomas Kalnoky and it has given him the idea that re-recording old songs and putting them in a new package is an acceptable thing to do. I fear this because Streetlight Lullabies is an acoustic folk album full of previously released songs.

That said Tomas Kalnoky, unlike Reel Big Fish, has the decency to change how the songs sound for this record. RBF's re-recordings may have better production values but sound exactly the same otherwise. Tomas Kalnoky (or Toh Kay, as he goes by for his solo work) re-arranged his songs to sound (mostly) different. In that aspect, it is a new piece of work and it is possible to find enjoyable.

Streetlight Lullabies is exactly what it sounds like: Streetlight Manifesto songs re-worked to sound like lullabies. Not like those Rock-a-Bye Baby collections, mind you, but songs performed in a finger-picked acoustic fashion. It's heavily focused on songs from Somewhere in the Between but it has a couple of cuts from Everything Goes Numb and Keasbey Nights. There isn't a whole lot else to say about it: the songs are played much slower than the originals but they sound nice and it's easy to fall asleep to... if nothing else, Streetlight Lullabies (in theory) is a nice stopgap to release in between proper full lengths, much like Kris Roe's acoustic album. This is despite that no one even has a slight idea when the next Streetlight album is going to drop (I don't even think the band knows) but I'm sure once it does arrive we'll all go crazy for it. Even the people who criticize this album. That's more or less a guarantee.

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