Comfort albums: Greetings from Timbuk 3

Every once in a while I dust off certain albums and listen to them, they tend to be ones that have a link directly to time in the past, something you played to death and still come back to like it’s a pair of comfortable shoes. They’re like comfort food, I call them comfort albums,

One such is Timbuk 3′s ‘Greetings from Timbuk 3‘ which is one of the best albums of the 1980′s and a criminally overlooked band. Their one big hit ‘Future So Bright‘ became a staple of films and graduations but most people completely missed the satirical message of conspicous consumption and success allied with nuclear holocaust. If you listen to the album however, you get various stories of the frontline of Reaganomics; Pat Macdonald’s critique of  presidential elections in ‘Just Another Movie‘ still sadly is true,  even the misleading fact they were a one-hit wonder is conveniently pre-criticised in ‘Shame on you’ (and later ‘B Side of Life‘). Even the video above for ‘Life is Hard’ seems to have a dig at their success, busking their one hit at the start as a knowing gesture…like ‘remember us, still?’. The only false note on the album are the few very new-wave upbeat B-5s style songs which have aged – Facts about Cats, or Hairstyles and Attitudes – that said you do need a respite from the darkness, something the later albums suffered from.

This album takes me back to 1991; I’d found the cassette album minus cover in a Woolies bargain bin for 99p and bought it, liking ‘Future So Bright’ – I thus knew hardly anything about the band this being pre-internet, but it got constant rotation, especially when I was painting at the end of my A-levels – I was doing this massive cubist painting in acrylic, and that and I think either Enigma or DM’s Violator playing on my auto-reverse Sony Walkman. I had other tapes but for some reason those ones seemed to stick.

Later the song ‘Love You In The Strangest Way‘ became the theme for my first long-distance relationship with Bob; less the scary aspects – although love is always scary and when it’s long-distance all the references to phones and answer machines, and the lines about sleeping together just the once also rang true.

Well worth checking it out, as well as the next two albums ‘Eden Alley’ and ‘Edge of Allegiance’ – if you only like the sillly songs you won’t like them as they not only talk about being down and out and the human condition they also add some timely critiques of Christian fundamentalism & religion, war and nationalism (and dog sampling?!?) – and gay rights to the mix, but if you like the more darker/sarcastic side of Timbuk 3′s output you’ll love these. My favourite song off those two albums is Easy – written by Barbara K as well as Pat Macdonald, about someone thinking bribe to throw a boxing match, it’s a beautiful tune as well as haunting lyrics. I didn’t know it had a video also:

So what’s your comfort albums?