Runt Star -- Daylight

 

The first time that I had ever heard of the word "runt" was back when I was a boy while I was reading the series of books "Clifford The Big Red Dog". One of the books actually goes into Clifford's origins when he was ironically born as the smallest of the litter...or the runt...and hadn't been expected to survive too long. Well, he ended up becoming one mighty large canine to even give Paul Bunyan pause.

It's not the smoothest segue into this band called Runt Star but let me go on. What information I could get on this group which probably focused on pop and rock has been through a couple of individual members' own J-Wiki profiles and it looks like Runt Star lasted between 1999 and 2007. Consisting of vocalist and guitarist Tetsuya Takatsu（高津哲也）, keyboardist Kazuya Saka（坂和也）, bassists Kazuyuki Murata（村田知之）& Shige Murata（村田シゲ）, and drummer Toshiyo Okada（岡田年世）, they apparently released most of their output between 2000 and 2002.

Their last album or EP was "Floral Words" in May 2002 with one track being "Daylight". The YouTube video has been up for over fifteen years, so that's a lot of staying power. I'm glad that it still exists because "Daylight" is a very pleasant tune to hear in a Spitz sort of way. It's so mellow that I would probably categorize the song as a pop melody without really any rock. In fact, it rather approaches the works of Blue Peppers and Kirinji. I can even hear an echo of Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat".