“This City in Darkness” is one of those tracks in my digital collection that is so obscure I’m not even certain how I found my way to it. To the best of my knowledge, I never played anything from the band Sport of Kings during my radio days, although I suppose it is possible. It seems the band hailed from Chicago, and the entirety of their output was issues only a handful of years before I arrived at my happy bunker with a fully working transmitter. Perhaps I did slip one of their records out of the C Stacks some late night, only to have the experience be fully forgotten years later. I doubt it, though. I’d like to think something infused with such a hearty blast of Joy Division styled goodness would have caught my ear.

Even now, information about Sport of Kings and their music is pretty difficult to track down. It doesn’t help that any search of band’s name with necessary modifiers to point away from horse racing and toward music from the nineteen-eighties is sure to lead to the dead end of a Triumph album. They are simply one of those bands that briefly flared up, made a glancing impression, and then faded into obscurity, picking up the stray diehard fan elated by the random discovery of their music decades down the line. That legacy doesn’t net the guys in the band rock star riches, but it does speak the unlikely endurance of great music. Put it down on record, and it has the possibility of stirring up joy for as long as needles can be dropped and speakers can pulse.

Listen or download –> Sport of Kings, “This City in Darkness”

(Disclaimer: “This City in Darkness” is on the 1981 EP On a Tall Building. Since even the most cursory informational details about Sport of Kings are elusive, I surely can’t find evidence that any of their music remains available for purchase, at least as physical items that can be procured from your favorite local, independently-owned record store in a manner than compensate both the proprietor of said shop and the original artist. The track is shared here, then, with the belief that doing so impedes no fair commerce. Even still, I will gladly and promptly remove the music file from my little corner of the digital world if asked to do so by any individual or entity with due authority to make such a request.)