Once again everyone’s favorite label, Victory Records, is involved with yet another despicable handling of one of their bands. Streetlight Manifesto, who have bore the brunt of Victory’s wrath for what seems like forever now, dealt a damning blow to the band with their latest album and final album on released on Victory Records which fulfilled their (I actually believe it’s solely Thomas Kalnocky’s) contract with the label. After quite a long delay with just releasing the album due to legal battles, Victory had one last sucker punch to deliver before Streetlight walked out the door; withholding the band’s own album from the band themselves, especially vinyl copies, preventing the band from selling their own music via any method. Victory also flat-out cancelled the companion album to The Hand That Thieves, Tomas Kalnocky’s solo acoustic rendition of the album under the moniker Toh Kay entitled The Hands That Thieve.
As a result of Victory withholding the album from the band, they were unable to fulfill almost every pre-order of the took through their webstore. To further muddy the waters, the band was eventually afforded copies of the album on CD, but would never be able to get copies on vinyl. Since the band would not be betting any copies of the album on vinyl, and the Toh Kay release was cancelled all together, the band was forced to automatically cancel or partially refund all orders containing vinyl and/or the Toh Kay album. My initial order fell into the flat-out cancel portion as I ordered the vinyl bundle with both the Streetlight and Toh Kay versions of the album. Yet another problem arose as The Risc Store, who handled Streetlight’s online merch orders, dragged their feet with refunds. A month later and most people are still waiting on refunds for vinyl orders of any sort. It took a bit of unorthodox persistence on my part to get a refund but I finally did.
Now that the record is finally released, here is the pressing info; 218 copies on white, 314 copies on green and 1,000 copies on black. The album was pressed as a double LP housed in a gatefold jacket. I’m very surprised Victory sprung for a gatefold jacket, but even so they cheaped out as it’s just the lyrics in black ink printed inside the gatefold. A download code is included but it’s for terrible 192 kbps MP3’s. You could get better quality by driving next to someone playing the CD in their car. An old school mail order catalog is included as well. It’s important to note that the white copies were initially supposed to be and advertised as “clear with black smoke” but somewhere along the lines changed to white. The pressing info was also initially round numbers, so 200 and 300 respectively. So far the only color that is sold out is the white, which is appalling as people are actually directly giving their money to one of, if not the worst labels to ever exist.
Stitches and Grooves 