Throwback MP3 of the Week: The Creature Comforts, “Skyline”
Once a week, Wayward Blog brings to you an MP3 of music from the area’s musical past.
For the debut installment of our Throwback MP3 series, I didn’t want to dig to deeply into the shelves. I figured I’d start out with something rather timely. Considering the Creature Comforts had their reunion show at the Record Bar last Saturday, they seemed the logical choice.
When the Creature Comforts were last playing regularly in 2002, I went to see them pretty much any time they played. Their shows with the People (later the Golden Republic) at the Replay were a regular occurrence. During that time, the band was focusing equally on their debut, The Politics of Pop, as well as their sophomore release Teaching Little Fingers to Play. You could also hear them playing new tunes alongside their cover of the Kinks’ “Picture Book.”
One of those new tunes was “Skyline.” It was just about the most rocking thing the band had ever written. Like “Sincerely, Me” and “Off Duty Eyes,” it stood out from the rest of the Creature Comforts’ tunes because it came within a hair’s breadth of pop-punk. You can argue that power pop and pop-punk share a lot of things (including my fandom), but this trio of tunes could’ve been marketed as a 7″ to the pop-punk underground and found rabid appreciation from fans of the Beatnik Termites and Pink Lincolns.
“Skyline,” along with “(The Glowing Horses Of) Racine,” “Bethany Parker,” and “Star Mining” never saw any official release. The only way I even new that they existed as anything other than live material was because when Cameron Hawk from the Dead Girls was host of KJHK’s local music show Plow the Fields, he played them.
If you bought a copy of Little Fingers at the reunion show, you got a bonus disc featuring all four 2002 demo tracks, as well as two songs each from their albums proper. Now, seven or eight years after the song first hit my ears and sent me reeling, I’ve got it for my own, and so do you.
