Introduction

The Kinks

Kinda Kinks 

Kinks Size/Kinkdom

Kink Kontroversy

Face to Face

Something Else

Live at Kelvin Hall

Are the Village Green Preservation Society

Arthur (Or The Decline and Fall Of the British Empire)

Lola Vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround

Percy

Muswell Hillbillies

Everybody's In Showbiz (Everyone's a Star)

Preservation

Preservation Act 2

A Soap Opera

Schoolboys In Disgrace

Sleepwalker

Misfits

Low Budget

One For The Road

Give The People What They Want

State of Confusion

Word of Mouth

Think Visual

Live: The Road

UK Jive

Phobia

To the Bone

The Great Lost Kinks Album

 

 

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Okay, dig...the first Kinks albums are darn near no good at all. Darn near, but containing some small concentration of goodness nonetheless. Enough that this thing is almost not a waste of thirty-two minutes, but it is anyway so go balance your checkbook or reorder your fantasy football team or whatever. The thing is, the Kinks were liable to bite off more than they could deep throat back in '64,They don't do exclusively covers, like the Stones, Yardbirds, or Animals, and they weren't good enough songwriters to rival the Beatles. These aren't even the 'hits plus' kind of ripoff albums the Motown guys were always putting out at the time...the only hits on here are the songs later to be stolen by late-70's arena-rock bands, the Pretenders' (and Ray Davies' future butch girlfriend Chrissie Hynde's) 'Stop Your Sobbing' and Van Halen's 'You Really Got Me'. Sure, you're no doubt saying right now, is it not better to hear the childish quacking of Ray Delay-vies. presenting us with his very first original stumblings through a borrowed chord progression rather than, say, the 364^th version of 'Walk the Dog' attempted by a British Invasion band in 1964? Umm...wait...yeah? No, wait...'Charlemagne'? '12 molar Hydrofluoric Acid in aqueous solution?' The 'Reverse Cowgirl'?

No, I really don't like their originals much at all. Other than the two big hits, right. Sure. 'You Really Got Me'...juh-juh-juh-juh-juh. Ur-rock classic. Little Richard boiled down to spit and vinegar. Dave Davies shouting 'fuck you!' before the solo (it's almost inaudible, but Ray sez its there in his Storytellers album because they kept bugging him as he fumbled his way through the solo, so I'll take the man's word for it).  Jimmy Page uncredited here and elsewhere. Classic song. Yadda yadda I'd fuck the crap out of Julia Louis Dreyfuss for three weeks straight...and not just when she had the cool hair, either. Yup..I'd take the schoolteacher hair JLD. The pasty, slightly pudgy JLD. On a platter with Louisiana Hot Sauce. Mmm. Yadda. Yes, I've just yadda'd sex. Yadda yadda yadda. Yadadda.

If you are taking bets on how bad this album gets or something, producer and manager Shel Talmy's skiffly 'Bald Headed Woman' and 'I've Been Driving On Bald Mountain' are simply horrendous. The definite low points. These are the kind of songs a hopelessly gay British-invasion manager locked-in-a-bus-for days-on-end-with-four-strapping-teenage-lads would write, which I guess explains the 'bald head' theme. Gawd...these songs are teeerible. Ray's other originals ('Just Can't Go to Sleep', 'So Mystifying', 'I Took My Baby Home', and 'Revenge', which was done with Jimmy Page, by the way) are much better in comparison, but they're still primarily horsepatoot. 

Despite what I claimed just three bloated, rambling paragraphs ago, this album does have covers. Big bouncy bunches of 'em. But its just that the Kinks clank their way through them with such little care that you'd swear they were just second-rate originals. The reason is that these guys are complete dipshits when it comes to R&B. They turn every riff that's supposed to be bluesy and slow into the theme to Rawhide, all jumpy and with the beat all turned around so it lurches instead of swings. I guess punk guys may have gotten a lot of influence from how cruddily these guys cover Chuck Berry (listen to 'Too Much Monkey Business' for the most rushed, train-wrecked version of a Chuck classic ever by a major rock band. Listen to the solo if you want to laugh so hard you have to change your britches.), but I say the best punk rock swings anyway (Stooges, Wire), so for me it's worthless. Shit. Hole! Courtney Love! I know 'Got Love If You Want It' from the Yardbirds, but this version bears so little resemblance to the Clapton-era version it took me awhile to figure out it was the same song until I actually concentrated on the vocals. Ray and Dave (god knows who's singing what on here) also put on so many 'growly' Big Black Blues Man voices they end up sounding like Steve Marriott with his head caught in an elevator door.

Anyway, they'd pretty much repeat this same album two more times, improving the formula ever-so-slightly each time around.  My thought is that the Kinks really weren't into albums too much. As their bonus tracks and US-only albums show, they put a lot of effort into hiding some pretty good tracks on the backs of singles where few people would look for them. Due to a mixup in the delivery room, most of my albums don't have  any of those bonus tracks, but what I'm saying is that if you happen to decide you need to buy these albums (head trauma) you should (go to the hospital and have a doctor tell you why your taste in records has gone so completely to shit) for all means buy the ones with the bonus tracks on 'em. Or just buy a nice, thick mid-60's-era greatest hits CD and spend the $40 you saved on a nice pair of slacks. Or a midget blowjob. Is that still what they're going for these days?

Saved by 'You Really Got Me', which would also make a fine title for this album if appended with the phrase 'and a Plethora of Cruddy B-Sides'

Capn's Final Word: David learned to 'reinvent' himself here...that's the only way recording studio people kept letting him make shitty singles over and over. I bet he wore disguises, too.  

Davies now writes damn near this whole album, and his songs range from sheer the sheer greatness of taking your one and only hit and Xeroxing it and somehow convincing the world (including your humble Capn) that it's yet another marvelous song. I'm talking 'bout 'All Day and All Of The Night', which I happen to have sung to my baby daughter Katia the first time I held her. She simply squinted and wondered what had become of her warm, wet sleeping bag. Anyway, the usual rule gets followed a second time again, where the singles ('Tired Of Waiting For You'. 'Something Better Beginning', 'All Day') are the sweet, sweet nectar of a benevolent God, the remaining originals are the detritus of a doomed physical world awaiting redemption, and the covers are, well, hamster caca that forces comparisons to the Herman's Hermits. Let's get those two ugly covers out of the way first, since there's only two of them among the original album tracks. Such obvious filler...First off, there's probably one of the earliest covers of Martha and the Vandals' 'There's Goop All Over the Phone (and Pleasant All Over the Bill)'...no wait.

'Dancin' In the Street', which as I've mentioned every time I come across it, is probably the most over-covered song in rock 'n' roll history outside of 'Summertime Blues' and 'Eat My Fuc'.  The Kinks version is probably one of the very worst, next to the Grateful Dead's dippy disco version on Terrapin Station and that one with the video where Mick Jagger and David Bowie look like they've been attacked by a 1984 Cuban drug kingpin version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The one where they look like they're going to start French-kissing and licking Aqua Net out of each other's hair at any minute. The fun one. Anyway, again the Kinks have about as much swing as a three-week old donut, and sound like they're about as liable to be found dancing in the street as feeding $1000 bills to a goat. Dave contorts his already warty voice into a falsely-gruff croak on the dull trad-blues cover of  Jack Dupree's 'Naggin' Woman', one so ugly it makes the lead vocals on 'I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight', themselves more full of posturing than the average episode of Def Comedy Jam, sound good.

The album starts off quite badly, actually, probably contributing greatly to my viewpoint that it's not that much better than the debut.  Instead of kicking off with one of their hits, it's got 'Look For Me Baby', just another histrionic unswinging R&B failure. Ray bravely (and stupidly) tests the limits of his half-octave vocal range while at the same time double tracking, meaning that when he hits a berk-note, he's not only not in tune with the music, he's not in tune with himself. The doubling trick is repeated throughout, making the vocals much uglier than they already are. I'd rather hear one Ray or one Dave sound thin and squawky than hear two (or more) of them attempt to grapple with the finer points of the musical scale. Dave takes the opposite approach and attacks his vocals with ferocity on the jive-talkin' 'Got My Feet On the Ground', fast and loaded with attitude, but not particularly strong musically, just two or three lousy chords strummed over and over. Then we hear Ray get all moody on 'Nothin' In This World Can Stop Me From Making This Song Title Thirteen Words Long', no doubt choosing a mood first selected by one of the Beatles on Beatles For Sale. Which is fine, but the song's mood can't sustain it when Ray's once again forgotten to insert a hook anywhere. Then we get 'Naggin' Woman' and 'Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight' and I wonder whether maybe I have some gutters to clean or something. Anything to get away from the chore of listening to the first half of this record.

'Tired Of Waiting For You' is the first serious glimmer of greatness on this record, and lemme tell you, it's not a moment too soon. Along with the inimitable chorus, gloriously balanced between desperation, desire, and sheer loathing, the interplay between the two guitars (one arpeggiating and the other riffing on a sort of slide pattern) and the busy drumwork is what makes this song work. The shifts in mood between the dismissive ('It's your life'), the angry (dig the last chorus where Ray hits 'SO TIRED' it sounds like he's not even sure he's going to wait any longer) and the vulnerable ('I was a lonely soul'..) are pretty recognizable for anyone who's ever wondered if their lover is playing them like a Dutch fiddle, and argued with themselves over what they're going to do about it. A great, great song, and a nice change from the much more easily digested garage rock of 'You Really Got Me'.

After another tune that sounds like Ray pandering to the charts at the behest of Shel Talmy, we get two more Beatles rips, one being yet another folksy, acoustic ballad thanks to Dylan-by-way-of-Beatles For Sale ('So Long') and the other being Dave's hoppin'  'I Feel Fine' ripoff 'Come On Now' (1:50 of incestuous Britpop greatness). I suppose tearing pages from your main competition wasn't completely unheard of in 1965, but the fact that the Kinks are so clear about where they're stealing their songs from (the riff to 'Come On Now' varying from 'Fine' by, like, half an eighth note or something) leads me to believe that either they were being positioned among the Merseybeat crowd by their management.  How that could happen when it was obvious that the Kinks had their own sound, proven a second brilliant time by the touching, self-delusionatory optimism of 'Something Better Beginning', that could rival even the Beatles themselves? There's too much time spent on Kinda Kinks trying to genre-ize the Kinks into sounding something like whatever was hot on the charts at the time, so when they'd go out on their tours and play their 10 minutes between Mickey Most and Marianne Faithfull, they could play a couple of rushed hits, a half minute of Motown, 48 seconds of an R&B ballad, 36 seconds of blues,  3 seconds of trying to keep their weak-ass little Vox amplifiers from blowing up, and then another hit and be off the stage again before you can say 'circus freak parade'. Promoters, radio, and management, didn't really give the Kinks the right circumstances to develop themselves for another year or so.  Other bands had better support (George Martin as a creative catalyst for the Beatles, also whom, like the Stones and others, had two equally good songwriters instead of just one) and since all improvements had to be made through Ray's pen alone (they sure weren't developing much as musicians, other than not having to rely on Jimmy Page to play their guitars anymore), his inconsistency was probable based on a lack of confidence in himself.

The bonus tracks on this CD constitute an entire second album, one that beats the britches right off the real Kinda Kinks. Of course, damn near all of these songs qualify as Greatest Hits, so you'll be catching them on the compilation you should be buying anyway.  But still, why couldn't such great tracks as the boogaloogling 'Everybody's Gonna Be Happy' (the first time the band uses their inability to swing to their sock-hopping advantage, rather than ignoring it and wishing it didn't exist) or the thematic sequel to 'Tired of Waiting For You', 'Set Me Free', a crunchy, ballsy sort of ballad with some primo examples of how to use crescendos. 'I Need You' is not much more than the less-successful third rewrite of 'You Really Got Me', but I'd have been overjoyed if this crispy creme hard rocker had been chosen to pick up the languid first side of Kinda Kinks. Critics like to point to 'See My Friends' due to its quasi-Eastern influence on the sliding vocal hook (apparently written following Ray travels to India in 1965) and near-psychedelic sound, but I think the spiky straight-world-falling-apart tune 'Well Respected Man' is just as revolutionary, if not more so. And not just because it has the line 'and his arm-sweat smells the best', which makes me giggle like I'd just seen Charlene Theron's panties. There's also some dull crud ('Don't You Fret' is ugly as sin), but it's really not any worse than the dull crud on Kinda Kinks I tried to convince myself to like.

By the way, my copy of this album (provided with great thanks by fellow reviewer and certifiable Englishman Adrian Denning) is an oddball one with 12 tracks, beginning with 'Look For Me Baby' and ending with 'Something Better Beginning' (Got a Hollywood ending, eh?) and about sixteen gazillion bonus tracks, and no 'All Day'. I only mentioned it earlier because the All Music Guide told me to, as if they know their arse from a garden shovel or something. I don't, which probably explains why I keep digging 9-month old chrysanthemum bulbs out of my rectum whenever I go on what I like to call 'fact-finding missions'.  Not All-Music Guide. They never make mistakes. Ever hear of that Elvis Presley album, 50,000,000 Hack Reviewers With an Axe to Grind Can't Be Wrong? Here, I'll hum a bit for you...'La la la, we get paid...la la la...say any inconsistent crap we want to say....la la la...read press releases all day...la la la...no payola here at all...la la la Britney Spears's Britney album gets the same grade as Let It Be and Quadrophenia...la la la *guitar solo**fade out*!'

Capn's Final Word: Ray just ain't himself yet. He's trying to be everyone people want him to be, but that just isn't him.

Who woulda thought that the American record company goons would have actually been able to assemble better Kinks records than the Kinks themselves? Remember when I said I'd have made a damn fine album out of the bonus tracks on Kinda Kinks? Well, here ya go, Don Ho, these two groaningly unfunny pun-titled records prove my point exactly. This is a 17-song mashed potato of the two releases listed in the title, leaving off some of the lamer stuff, including a cover of 'Long Tall Sally' that I'm sure ain't no damn good based on the continuing failure of the Kinks to cover anything well. Here this is exemplified by the only cover included, a freakishly sanitized version of 'Louie Louie'. Now this is a song that would probably seem to be perfect for the three-chord Monties to crash and burn, but is distracted and weak as performed here. Also left off are 'All Day and All Of The Night', which you should probably have somewhere else anyway, and a few others, but this leaves the resulting CD a strong example of the ability of the early Kinks to make their own sound, separate from and in spite of the commercial urgings of Shel Talmy. As I said, 16 of the 17 are originals, and they show Ray getting more and more comfortable with himself.  The first section is given over to what I'd call more 'generic' British Invasion '65 stuff, you know, that speedy R&B boogie stuff that kids would call 'rave ups' when the band would shift from playing merely blindingly fast (gotta get that set over quick before the Fire Marshall shuts down the hall) to a speed approaching the beating of hummingbird wings or how quickly monkeys masturbate, where the boys in the audience would wiggle so fast their pressed white shirts would come untucked from their pressed brown trousers and the girls would scream and hop around until rivulets of girl pee would begin to form,.rolling down the aisles, gathering tributaries and other rivers until forming a veritable Lake Michigan of estrogen and YooHoo in the front row. The second half has a few more of those 'mini revolutions' that would end up spicing up Kink Kontroversy, 'Well-Respected Man', the stupendous ambiguously-gay-baiting 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion', featuring some of the hugest guitar sound to come out of a twinky Sixties amp speaker (that's either a 12 string, a bunch of well-hidden overdubs, or just another bit of Dave Magic making that enormous, warm-bath guitar noise), the brilliant proto-psychedelic boogie 'Sitting On My Sofa' (perfect for wiggling next to a tall blonde in a minidress on the dancefloor of the Matrix in 1966), and one of the most underrated Kinks songs ever, 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else', which has more punk spirit than an entire army of 'You Really Got Me's.  This is a brooding mix of self-loathing and wild swipes at the straight world, no doubt coming as a result of Ray's feelings of alienation from the 'rock' community in Britain, partially because he never was much of a social butterfly anyway, and partially because he was married with a kid by 1965, and felt too much responsibility to his family to leave them to go party 'like everybody else'. Believe me, I know what that feels like...you're blessed with the love and sweetness of a family, but the constant feeling of obligation is hard to diminish. See, Ray was sort of a 'trad values' kind of guy, for whom the dishonest and selfish actions of many of his cohorts were unconscionable, even if from time to time he envied them. Huh...I guess Ray was finally starting to explore his true talent, which was expressing emotions and opinions that didn't quite fit into the fashionable artifice of rock music, but strike very true to people who live real lives. To be honest, I don't know what it feels to be 'like a Rolling Stone', or to be a 'Ramblin' Man', no matter how attractive people can make those lifestyles seem. But I do know what it feels like to wish to be set free from a dying relationship (one where you don't necessarily have the courage to do it for yourself), and I do know what it feels like to not feel like everybody else (to be the only person with a family in my office full of yuppies is pretty hard, lemme tell you), and not necessarily wanting to be that way, either.  The fact that Ray was an accomplished rocker making these kinds of strides, instead of a touchy-feely folkie or something means quite a lot to me.  It means he recognizes and sees through the game, the 'act' that a lot of rock is based around. Sometimes you need the escapism of a cock-rockin' modern pirate, raping and pillaging through the straight world, and sometimes its good to know someone realizes it's all really a joke, and hear a human heart beating behind the power chords. Ray would soon explore this side of himself even more brilliantly, until he finally became cynical enough to put up some masks of his own. But that's a story for 20 pages down.

Anyway, I probably shouldn't have spent so long reviewing the far lamer Kinda Kinks and left this review sketchier than a side character in a George Lucas movie, but there ya go.  There's some bad and boring stuff here, too (a lot of the songs you've never heard of are simply okay), but the amount of greatness far outweighs it.  If you can, spend the time to seek these tunes out.

Capn's Final Word: It's all about the single. Of course, ya could just buy a compilation like a normal person.

Of the three British 'Kink-bla-bla' albums sequenced by the band and Shel Talmy in 1964 and 1965, this is by far the best, but compared to the B-side/ EP gems collected on Kinks-Size/Kinkdom, there's still too much compromising going on with this record to say the Kinks were really pulling it together. Granted, they finally break their cover version curse with a blazing version of 'Milk Cow Blues' that...at last...sounds like it has some balls. Ray and Dave whip the Betty White out of their guitars, and Ray uses his own nasally-gross voice to belt out the lyrics rather than trying to make it sound like someone else's. Someone black. Someone with soul. See, Ray ain't got no soul, not in the Ray Charles sense of the word, anyway (he is not, as you say, 'soulless', however). He's a snotty, depressive British punk with a jerky brother and a strained home life. And dammit, he sounds best when he's singing his songs as that guy. He's getting better at his ballads, too, and Kontroversy is loaded with 'em. Is that what's Kontroversial about it? That there's finally no references to 'You Really Got Me' and he's gotten good enough not to sound like he's ripping off the Beatles every other tune? That's a nice sort of controversy to be in, isn't it? Not like turning on your TV set and seeing that talentless, toothless wretch of a PR-exercise Ashlee Simpson and her gutless band of fifteen-year-old Old Navy models every time you turn around. They say she got booed by 70,000 people at the Orange Bowl this week. What they don't tell you is how many millions of people out in TV land got physically sick at hearing her sanitized Disney Morissette act like I did.

Anyhow, this ain't a review page for Ashlee fucking Simpson (and God help me if it was...I'd be popping so many blood vessels I'd look like Boris Yeltsin after a bachelor party). This is a damn Kinks page, so let's start reviewing nipple clamps and genital electroshock machines already! Get your bored housewives and your masochistic millionaire businessmen over here and let's begin!

Really, Kontroversy is pretty strong. I sorta have a hard time calling it a classic, though, because too much of it sounds similar in its draggy, exhausted feel.  Sure, this was, what, their fourth album of new material since their debut (at least)? I guess they had a right to be feeling draggy and exhausted. Try to listen to 'You Can't Win' or 'Gotta Get the First Plane Home' and not see a bunch of haggard looking Kinks hashing their way through the zillionth recording session after the zillionth theatre gig after the zillionth night sleeping on an unheated bus. Damn near impossible, I say. The rocking generally seems forced here, partially because of overwork (it's hard to play fast on little sleep and bad food), and partially because their draw really isn't hard rock anymore. The last of the 'You Really Got Me's marked the end of that for quite awhile. They're generally moving in more touchy-feely directions, (and have been, steadily, since the debut), but some of it simply bonks around in an acceptably catchy, competent nowhereville rather than showing the true brilliance Ray is capable of. 

In other words, I feel this album approaches 'crafty greatness' rather than sheer brilliance. He's learned what his band does and doesn't do well (well, almost...the snory boogie 'It's Too Late' wouldn't be any good by anybody, much less this somnambulistic bunch). He's learned his way around a chord sequence, and he knows a lot of little tricks, but often the songs don't really feel like there's much inspiration backing them. I'm really thinking 'When I See That Girl Of Mine' or 'I'm On An Island' here...songs that cry out for that next little push from Ray, and not getting it. Call it a 7 on a 10 scale for a LOT of this record. For the ballads, 'I Am Free' is melodic and all, but its tempo is way too lope-y, 'Ring the Bells' is darn, darn pretty though, especially when I think back to all the generic teeny-land ballads on Kinda.

Tired-sounding or not (listen to those barely-there vocals), 'Til The End Of The Day' is an undeniably great youthful pop song that seems to intimate much more than it actually says (maybe I'm just buying too much into the 'you and I are free, we do what we please, yeah), and Ray outdoes himself on the background harmonies and tempo changes here. Same thing goes for Van Halen's 'Where Have All The Good Times Gone', yet another cry for help ('will this depression last for long'), but set to one of the young band's sharpest hooks. As for that chunky rhythm guitar, it'd come in shorter and shorter supply as the band would begin its more overtly 'pop' period the next year, so if you like albums with guitars in the grooves in addition to pictures of guitars on the cover, then maybe this oughta find its way in your shopping basket next to your dipillatory cream and wart remover, huh?

I have to be honest here. These early Kinks albums, including the relatively great Kinks-Size/Kinkdom, haven't been a barrel of Monkees for me to review. There's something about them I'm generally not too hot on. Maybe it's that they're either trying damn hard to sound like people they aren't (Beatles, Motown), and aren't really good enough to know yet who they are. Like that makes any sense. Anyway, I spent a LONG time listening to these four over, and over, and over trying to finally get enough of a handle on them for a decent set of reviews (I think I probably blew that pretty terribly, huh?), even stopping and starting several times because I just couldn't figure it out. I simply do not love them. The singles, yeah. Some of the best singles I've ever heard. It's just that these four can easily be substituted for by a well-chosen greatest hits CD and no pain will ever be felt. Perhaps I just don't buy Ray singing what end up being pretty mundane love songs, and while he sings about other things on Kontroversy, they are simply too worn-down to make it really work. Anyway you look at it (you secretly agree, you think I'm an ignorant fool for preferring the Animals, you yawn at how dull these reviews have been), I really don't think I'll feel like listening to any of these albums again anytime soon. Let's just leave it that I'm very happy to be leaving behind these mid-Sixties Kinks albums, never to look back again. Let's get to an album with a title with no fucking K's in it, alright?

Capn's Final Word: Like married sex, once they realise what they can do, and how to do it, they're to tired to do it right.

Face to Face - Pye 1966.

Twee...but also nice 'n' fine, Face to Face is where them Kinks begin to shed their Kink-[Fill In Musty Pun On Kink Name Here]-era exploitied-tourin' band-exhaustion blues and once again become a decent band of bratty British guys with large spaces between their front teeth who wear purple velvet jackets for a living.  Face to Face is the first of the really strong Kinks albums, and going onward from that big stupid 'confessional' at the end of Kontroversy when I said I liked their first three records about at much as being forced to watch a Richard Gere movie marathon, this one is the first I like much at all. Granted, I didn't necessarily care for it the first time around, but the same thing would be true of Something Else, too. This is also where they acquiesce and begin embracing their inner Britishness, more or less dropping their blues and R&B-influenced stylistics completely, and embracing a land of Well Respected Men About Town who spend their time drinking tea and, umm...playing harpsichord, apparently. Through the next few years, the Kinks inability to adjust (lower?) themselves to producing psychedelic mishmash rock for the kids with the green cash, plus a crippling ban on touring in the US (apparently Ray punched a musician's union representative. Either that, or something equally as reckless in its disregard for the Mafia) left them commercially bereft, but for 1966, this album is spot on. There was a period there sometime after Kontroversy and before Something Else when the Kinks were monumentally influential in the British Invasion scene. Just about every rock band worth their 1.5 cents/record put out a pop-fractured, chimey rock album loaded with sly social commentary in 1966, and most of them had harpsichords somewhere or another. Anyway, I'm sayin' that this (and, to a lesser degree, Something Else) is also the last time the Kinks were ever on the cutting edge. After this the band spent twenty five years either ignoring trends (late 60's - early 70's), blandly chasing them (late 70's), or simply taking a big sharp knife and fork and chowing down on their back catalogue for ideas (the rest).

In case you've got some Rain Man-esque list of 'big missed opportunities in the rock world', take note that apparently this album was originally meant to include a bunch more of the sound effects and spoken word announcements than it would end up with (there's a telephone ringing at the beginning of 'Party Line', some crashing surf on 'Holiday In Waikiki', and a couple of other places), because, of all things, the record company thought it'd be too uncommercial. Eh? Zongo? Zoinks! Too uncommercial?!? This is like saying using a mouse will never catch on because people like using the command prompt too much. A year later, everybody and their friend Steve was falling all over themselves to put out an album with all that gimmicky crap on it once Sergeant Pepper's came out and began infecting everyone's brain. To think the Kinks could've been the first of the big Brit Invasion bands with a 'concept album', something that would assuredly have had all the twinky rock writers all up in a huff, but was cheated out of it is so...darned....Kinks. That's the thing with this band. They're underdogs. They sing about 'little men', never hung out at the Roxy getting drumk with Ringo, had all manner of legal and other problems, and never got the same respect as their bigger brothers at all. The fact that they were so 'hard luck' and ended up nearly forgotten by the 80's make them a perfect 'find' for a rock enthusiast (or, even worse, for a 'rock critic'). To say the Beatles is your favorite band has no cache, no cool amongst the thumb-twiddling crowd. It's like saying your favorite baseball team is the Yankees. To say the Kinks, now that is cool. Everyone's heard of 'em, but most of them realize they've heard almost nothing of their music. People like losers, and the Kinks are one of the classic 'loser' bands who had a (fairly) rough go at first but are now treated very kindly by history.

Anyway, the album. So quite a bit of it is great, and even the tunes that I would call fillerish or overdone sound tight and sharp. Listen to 'Session Man' for a good example. This is a nasty and un-called for attack on the folks who made Kinks possible, which is kind of like someone writing a song about how dumb the janitor has to be to go around emptying people's trash all night. But musically, it's big and heaving, the hard guitars meshing with the harpsichord to form a very strong true rock sound rather than using instrumentation to mask or apologize for the loud rock kids' music. Mostly, I'd say the success of these songs has more to do with the success of how Ray handles the subject matter than anything else. Musically, this stuff is great, jangly three-chord Kinks rock with just a hint of folkiness for a pseudo-Byrds chime that shows up on most of the songs (as opposed to the crunchy distortion of the Little Green Amp era of the year before, anyway). Much of the time, Ray is talking about some mundane shit, from the lack of privacy/voyeuristic quality of a 'Party Line' (he bitches about people listening on his line, but he's obsessed with figuring out who HE's listening to) to your older sister moving away (yup, 'Rosie Won't You Please Come Home' ain't about a girlfriend), or a terminal bachelor ('Dandy'). And that's just the first three songs. He's not talking about universal minds or any of that shit, is he? From here on out, this is pretty much par for the course for ol' Ray...he takes some reasonably interesting character or situation, sets it up, and then comes to some 'conclusion about it. It's not particularly poetic, and the fact that his music seems to revolve around the same half-dozen strummed chords all the time makes it fairly limiting as the formula gets used over and over. He chooses his target  and pretty much sums up a song in one question - 'Isn't Hawaii overcommercialized?' ('Holiday In Waikiki', to which I'd respond 'Isn't it also true of ripping off Chuck Berry's 'You Never Can Tell' in this way?) 'Aren't rich people shallow and foolish?' ('Most Exclusive Residence For Sale', 'House In The Country' - Ray was really big on houses, wasn't he? Maybe he shoulda quit and become a realtor when his talent ran out on him in 1972. He coulda called it Shangri-La Realty.)

In other places, Ray goes autobiographical about his continuing rough patch first hinted at on Kontroversy, and when he's speaking of himself he seems pretty sincere and engaged about what he's doing. I think these are the real great tunes on Face to Face. You can have your social commentary for all I care. 'Rainy Day In June' genuinely sounds hopeless ('everybody felt the rain'), and 'Too Much On My Mind' genuinely confused. Somehow, Ray combines the two sides of his songwriting only once, on the bleary 'Sunny Afternoon', a black comedy which sets the scene of a man who's sitting drinking a beer, no doubt unshaven in his bathrobe and on a beat-up old plastic Chaise Lounge, not paying attention to the repo men marching past carrying off various delinquent couches and television sets, his wife and girlfriend having left him after episodes of 'drunkenness and cruelty'. Considering this song is usually misinterpreted as a sort of pseudo-Beach Boys bit of happy crappy joy joy, the actual thought that's gone into conveying this mental picture is astonishing.

Anyhow, there's a crapload of songs on this album, and a couple of true stinkers. To go through them in a rushed sentence because this review is nearing three pages in length already without a single coherent thought to sully it - I think 'Fancy' is nothing more than a weak followup to 'See My Friends', and 'Dandy' is just gross, and 'You're Lookin' Fine' has, like somewhere between three and five words in the whole damn thing. Face to Face is still a very strong bunch of folk-rocky, dance-hally, and generally bittersweet tunes, and one that sets up the Kinks not only for the next, and best-ever, phase of their career.  Think of it as their first proper 'album' in the 'self-contained underwater boogie apparatus' sense of the word.

I swear I can not only hear some pubescent boys screaming along with those armies of little horn-rimmed hormball teenyboppers in the audience, but I think I can also discern some pockets being picked, some virginities being prematurely stolen away, and even, faintly, behind the guy having a heart attack during 'Come On Now', the sound of someone's innocence being lost. Forever. But hey, enough about what it was like to wade knee-deep through the spit and piss and hormones of a mid-60's rock 'n' roll audience, and onto the music. Or, at least, what's left of it after you dig yourself out from under the six million tons of screaming and carrying-on that was so unwisely chosen as the most important item in the Kelvin Hall mix. I wouldn't get at all as excited as Mary Jane and her 20,000 friends do...these songs sound exactly goddamn like what the band plays on the records, except for: A) the horrendous mix, B) some notes crunched so badly it makes  L'il Jon sound like Judy Garland, C) the horrendous mix, D) 'Happy Birthday', E) 'The Batman Theme Jam', F) the hordes of zit faces sing along on 'Sunny Afternoon', and G) the horrendous mix. This mix is so fucking shit milkshake it makes the usual comparison pieces - Got Live If You Want It, Live at Shea Stadium, and Beach Boys Live sound like models of modern live sound reproduction in comparison. The lead and backup vocals are unnaturally up-front, so much so they sound obviously overdubbed. Now, considering how much David Copperfield sleight-of-hand was used on all the other live albums of the time, I really don't have much of a problem with that. In fact, the vocals are the best thing about the album...you get to hear 'Sunny Afternoon' or 'Well-Respected Man' again, and that's not bad for anybody who isn't the pointy-eared pig blood-guzzling lead singer of some gay-ass Norwegian black metal outfit. But try to bend your ear to hear the guitars and you'll probably end up bashing headlong into Ray's clunky rhythm guitar, a blocky, chunky beast subject to frequent dropouts and 'issues' with Mick Avory's near-inaduible timekeeping. Dave's lead is simply not there, and the bass comes and goes more times than Biz Markie at the Golden Corral sundae bar. Considering that those  screams completely take over the album every fifteen seconds or so, forever slaughtering any budding groove that might've sprung up since the last orgasmic eruption of girl, and the goddamn instruments seem to pop up and down from inaudibility at completely random (and inappropriate) times, sometimes this album is just a chore to listen to. Yeah, there's a point or two that tells me the Kinks were at least darned enthusiastic about what they were doing ('Come On Now'), and had enough rock 'n' roll spirit just to bash it out with two fingers and an asshole and not worry one Tina Yothers about polish or professionalism, but Kelvin Hall is nothing more than yet another one of those hostile historic documents of what things were like before decent PA's, half-competent sound mixing, and free love to burn off some of that stupid pent-up Sixties frustration.

As a note, my version of this record has both a mono and stereo version of each album. The stereo is cleaner but more muffled, and sounds like the band is playing live on Waikiki Beach in front of a crashing surf complete with seagulls. The mono version is rawer and more 'rock 'n' roll', and those seagulls quickly become girls that would later become your mother (or...ugh! grandmother!). I reviewed the mono version above, but the stereo version wouldn't score much higher.

Capn's Final Word: The screeching isn't just coming from Ray's guitar. Five Live Yardbirds can rest easy.

Not really much else. Nothing new anyway. Essentially the same album as Face to Face again, except replacing the buzzed-up British groove of that album with slower bathwater tempos and a dull, tired vibe, just like on Kontroversy but instead of banging on the guitar, Ray spends a helluva lot of time banging at the piano. Ray's deepening sense of depression has gotten so great he can't whip it and beat it back underneath his skin anymore, he just lets it plop out and flop all over the studio booth like a one-legged dog, out for all to see.   This is an album that, for all its melodicism and professionalism, is as grey as its blecchy cover art.  Thing is, it's still darn good, and if you compare it to all the 1966-7 era Between the Buttons and Revolvers and Four Small Faces and Quick Ones and Sell Outs, it's good to hear something a bit more honestly, genuinely dysfunctional instead of just a bunch of winky-winky nudge-nudge giggling up a ruffled sleeve about how much fucking dope they've been scoring and how much authority they've been giving wedgies to lately. Ray seems to be in full realization that he is, in fact, not like anyone else, and is finding himself more and more isolated from the rock 'n' roll inner core. His character studies make a return, but instead of snotty barbs at poofy rich jackasses, he (and Dave) immerse themselves in all manner of poxy losers. Everyone populating the world of Something Else is either depressed, obsolete, envious, or reclusive. Sad clowns, failures, and social retards populate this miniature Happy Valley USA, just a real fun bunch to go to Six Flags with.

It's hard to argue that Something Else is not a good album, but it sure is a bummer to make it through. The envy-loaded opener 'David Watts' boogies pretty well in a pseudo-'Let's Spend The Night Together' piano groove, but from here the tempos eaaaassseee into a slovenly lope and things either sound soppy drunk and sodden ('Harry Rag', 'Tin Soldier Man', both of which remind me of something a drunken dockworker might sing 10 minutes to close at his favorite skuzzy pub) or damn near to pulling a Freddy Krueger on the ol' wrist veins.

Luckily, the final song is the best on the album and one of the best of the band's entire career, 'Waterloo Sunset'. The song sounds like what would've happened if Brian Wilson had produced Pet Sounds with only the four Kinks as players (though I doubt Brian would've let that ugly-butt slappy guitar echo stay on the tape).  Funnly enough, no one ever mentions that 'Waterloo Sunset' is written from the point of view of someone too shy to actually go out and meet someone at Waterloo Station themselves - he's just sitting by the window, his life revolving around the little joy of seeing Whoozit and Whatzit meet each other with a great big sloppy kiss every day in the middle of the dirty rush of London. Boy, Ray is really a pick-me-up, isn't he? Still the song is beautiful simply because the narrator doesn't care that he's nothing more than a spectator in his own life. Waterloo sunset's fine, eh?

Having a nice outlook on a shitty life sure is better than the endless darkness that inhabits much of the rest. There's the ponderous crooner 'End Of The Season', or Dave's overcooked 'Death Of A Clown' ('the fortuneteller lies dead on the floor/no one needs fortunes anymore' - I mean, come on! If that doesn't put a jump in your spark plug and a smile on your face, maybe you don't deserve any ice cream tonight, Mr. Grumpy!!), or maybe the maudlin bored-housewife weeper 'Two Sisters'. Too many of the tracks use the same old chords, the same old drumbeats, and the same old vocal melodies they've been tramping through for four albums already (and 'Situation Vacant' steals its little organ fill from Dylan), and missteps like Dave's icky, cock-rocking 'Love Me Till The Sun Shines' let sections of the album down. Still, there's that extra-sticky lovemuffin 'popcraft' in evidence here, oozing from the pores of this album. Me? I wish they'd have given it a few more sticky hooks, but then again I'm the guy who digs ABBA, right?

Capn's Final Word: Ray begins his conscious split from the moneygoround here, but his clothes at least still fit the style.  Pop genius, but a tad too drab.

Proof that not everyone was injecting Yellow Submarines into their eyeballs and licking the mud off each others' flabby, pasty white-middle-class hippie thighs in 1968, In fact, the Kinks were talking about getting old, steam-powered trains, and how sexy cousin Bessie looks in her shapeless heel-length black wool skirt, bent over the butter churn out in the middle of the barnyard next to the enormous pile of horse apples. This freaky nostalgia trip is the first of the essential Kinky records, not quite as good as Arthur and a bit too draggy at the end to be absolutely perfect, but good enough that if you're a fan of rock music and haven't heard it...well, most people haven't, but you're still an incomplete person until you have. TKATVGPS used to be considered a frumpy, dated, and terminally uncool Kinks record, but has by The Year of Our Lard 2005 into a bona-fide classic of down-home folk rock (of the rockin' kind, not the kind of country corn-poke the Byrds were making by this time), still closely related to the sounds of Face or Som'in Else, but more real, less show-offy and with striking, supernova melodies on almost every song.  They begin to get a little repetitive with themselves towards the end (there's 'Village Green' to go along with the highly superior 'We Are the Village Green Preservation Society', and 'People Take Pictures of Each Other' to go along with the superior 'Picture Book') but there's still more great songs on this album than we've seen from the Kinks yet. Ray's still only really comfortable with his chosen handful of chords and song formulas, and he's far from being the stylistic adventurer he was back on Face, but when you're putting an album of such maturity and grace (eew! I just realized how much like a Special Hallmark Television Production), all that's really important is that he's written a brave group of songs that sound wonderful when performed by the Kinks plus (there's plenty of organs and pianos to augment the guitar/bass/drums, but not in a 'hey lookit me! I'm Dave Davies and I'm playing a fucking organ! Isn't that weird?' fashion.

The first side is the superior one, the part where the album's concept of nostalgic longing for long-dead innocence and integrity is represented the strongest.  The title track states the Kinks' mission - they're preserving the good old wooden stuff (custard pie, Fu Manchu, virginity, to pick three at absolute random) from creeping extinction at the hands of callous, inhuman modernism (office blocks, skyscrapers, etc.) in a simple, brilliant, upbeat pop-rock song that the Kinks were just built for. Well, maybe they weren't built for Beach Boys vocal harmonies, but this and 'Waterloo Sunset' go a long way towards arguing that maybe they were. The thing is, even in 1969 a lot of this stuff was already gone, and though Ray mostly lists material items that represent goodness, he seems more upset at the loss of humanity that the destruction of a village green (aka a town square, for the Americans out there) represents. Ray's nostaligia is not just for the big things, either...the wonderful 'I Remember Walter' pines for the memories of youthful exuberant friendship, realizing that while his buddy Walter is still alive, he's probably been changed so much by adulthood he can't even relate to his old memories anymore. He goes on with the joyous 'Picture Book' (now featured at your local television set as the background for an ad for junk dealer Hewlitt Packard, along with the Cure's 'Pictures of You', neither of which deserve this treatment. Why not Def Leppard's 'Photograph'? Or, Yes! GODDAMN!! Better yet!! J. Geils Band's 'Centerfold'...now there's an ad I wouldn't mind seeing!), speaking of how people preserve their memories in photographs, and 'to prove they loved each other'.  One thing to note is that, for once, Ray doesn't sound particularly critical of any of his subjects this time around.  He's moved from farcical character assassinations of different misfits and clowns like 'Well Respected Man' to over-dramatic (but beautiful) portrayals of depression like 'Waterloo Sunset', and now he's finally arrived at a point where he makes looking at pictures sound, well, like a good, human experience. He doesn't say, 'Boy, you idiots with your cameras, you're so banal' like he might've a few years before, but he does feel the devastating power of realizing you're not as happy as you once were in your pictures. Getting older and getting cynical aren't necessarily happy processes, and Ray seems to have approached his middle-agedness with a rapidity and self-conscious greacelessness usually reserved for pedophiles signing up to teach swim lessons. We'll soon find out that Ray knew the extent of what was happening - after about 1970 he began to have fewer and fewer good new ideas, and indeed began to become lazily nostalgic in his own way - by recycling old concepts, songs, and even riffs. Of course the man was afraid of losing his young and innocent days - he was already doing it!

Anyway, the rest of Side 1 (yes, even the gloriously atheistic 'Big Sky', which some people hate but is one of my very favorites) is simply bonkers with great tunes. 'Johnny Thunder' ain't about much (rebel without a clue), but it rocks hard with its Who acoustics and even more Who-y 'Ba ba ba ba ba ba!' chants. 'Steam Powered Trains' plays a boogie bluesman pastiche to machismo of the old days (in the form of a train locked in a museum), and ranks as one of the Kinks' better attempts at black music. The racing coda is awesome, as if the Soul Train itself is dreaming of one last blast to Funkytown. 'Sitting By the Riverside' is a cute but inconsequential pastoral softshoe, continued thematically by the gentle folk-rocker 'Animal Farm' (nothing to do with Orwell, thank God. Just cats and goats and sunshine) and 'Village Green'.

It's around here that you're either completely held under the haystack spell of Ray Davies' country-life fantasies or you're bored as hell and want another 'Steam Powered Trains' to shake the endless acoustic mid-tempo rockers up a little bit. It really isn't to be, though he at least changes himself up enough to sing about something other than how fucking sublime walking outside in the grass is, man. Except it's 'Starstruck', which I think is nasty and patronizing to his obsessed female hanger-on. This sounds a whole helluva lot more like something that would belong on Lola, anyhow. Bring back the hayseeds, Ray, I've had enough of what you think about the women who you associate with. Village Green ends with only one more classic ('All Of My Friends Were There'), but at least keeps it interesting stylistically - 'Phenomenal Cat' is, what, a minuet? Something for girls in enormous hoped skirts and powdered wigs to twirl daintily to (quietly, mind), and is absolutely and positively opposed by the spiders 'n' witches horror show of 'Wicked Annabella'. This one's not particularly loud, either, but unsettling as hell compared to the sunniness of the rest of this well-mannered album. 'People Take Pictures' is jaunty again, but since we haven't had a sunny, jumpy tune since all the way back to 'Village Green', and even that's bittersweet. Okay, so is 'Pictures', but that's only because you realize most of the people in the pictures he's talking about are probably dead and gone. So it goes.

This record review has now taken more time to write than three whole spins through the record itself, but I have to mention 'All Of My Friends Were There', Ray relating a bout of stage fright unfortunately occurring in front of a bunch of people he knew, as one of the Kinks most beautiful and intelligent songs of Ray's career. As the music shifts from a jouncy half-polka during the 'performance' segments, dissolving to a gorgeous, Beatlesque descending-note ballad during the 'aftermath' choruses. It seems interesting to me that Ray makes such a case that 'no one cared' about his return to form the next show, making it much easier for him not to care either. Considering how flip Ray seemed to be about his career years later, perhaps this is a confession that, at some time, something within him 'broke' when his friends were no longer there to provide him with a lifeline back to his real self. When that happened he ceased to 'care' and merely became professional. Or, as those of us who've heard all of the endless Preservation set might say, a 'tonedeaf whiner'.

Capn's Final Word: The Kinks become great by being themselves, just not as punky. Make the old age seem just as wacky as the new age.

John Kimble     Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: Hey!  This album is really great, in fact, it's my favorite.  I can see why you'd value Arthur higher, but for my money not even the Beatles can put out this consistant and great of a set of songs.  For me, the simplicity only makes it - the Kinks are best when they don't overstretch their boundaries.
 

Glenn   cuzzino@aol.com   Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: This is a beautiful and wistful album, that jumps from one rock solid melody to the next, as Ray Davies ponders themes of loss, regret, and memory, all the while using ye olde England as a backdrop. Standout tracks include 'Big Sky', 'Animal Farm' and 'Do You Remember Walter'. A damn fine listen.

john doyle, kildare ireland.     Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: il get to the point [which unfortunately i usually dont...] THIS IS CLASS PERSONIFIED.if you have a soul,then nourish it with this li'l baby. call it a+ or call it 11/10,either way this is magnificent.

Ahh, yesssss.....the connnnnncept album. Ray's score for a never-finished TV movie is one of the few I really understand and one of a very small number I totally respect. It'sd loosely based around the life of Ray's brother-in-law (I think, anyhow. It's been several years since I read X-Ray, but it was good enough to read again) and how it relates to how the British Empire (and British Culture, as personified by the Victorian age) decayed faster than British Teeth and left us with such late-Twentieth Century highlights as brutally violent union suppression, Northern Ireland, and the Spice Girls . We are introduced into the Britain of 100 years ago ('Victoria') and follow young Arthur (yes, like that old dude with the bitch in the lake, but make him a boring, oafish, 100% un-romantic accountant with no swords), seeming through a stint in the fascist British school system, which feeds kids straight into the Queen's army ('Yes Sir, No Sir') before shipping them off to war ('Some Mother's Son'). Upon returning, he spends a few young years in romantic irresponsibility ('Driving'), but soon finding he wants nothing more than a nice, sensible helping of domestic bliss ('Brainwashed'). He ends up having to move to Australia to really find it ('Australia'), but quickly has the realization that his home life and job becomes a prison in itself ('Shangri La'). There's a bit of a detour from Arthur as there's another war ('Mr. Churchill Said'), but we soon return to find our protagonist piddling out his days with materialism, self-delusion ('She Bought A Hat Like Princess Marina'), and pitiful nostalgia ('Young and Innocent Days'), while his kids leave him far behind as they go racing off into their own lives ('Nothing to Say'). Now, that might all seem unnecessarily cruel to ol' Arthur, but Ray makes sure to say that 'maybe he was right and the world was wrong' on the last song. It's a bit too little too late after an album of saying the man 'looks like a real human being but doesn't have a mind of his own'. Perhaps it's all supposed to be a big parable for England itself, from the fascistic chauvinism and lack of critical thinking that marked the late Victorian age, through the horror of the first World War and the joys of having come out on top, but then into an irreversible slide (slowed but not stopped by the heroism of the Second World War) marked by, well, materialism, self-delusion, pitiful nostalgia, and a generation gap wider than Churchill's canine-like jowels. Whatever...either way 'Australia' doesn't really play too well with the other kids on the playground. I like it as a song, as it's main influence came from the advertisements Ray would see for Australia as a sort of 'pasty white paradise' for Britons to immigrate to. According to my British pals, every Briton that got sick of England and moved there (or to the Falklands, or Hong Kong, or whatever) sooner or later begins to pine for the perpetual rain and soggy food of the homeland and wants to make a return. I dunno 'bout that (I'm semi-proudly 'Merican, and a Certified Isolated Midwesterner at that) but I do know that the half-assed jam that ends up the song is just goofy enough (it sounds like Santana on PCP) to justify its despicably un-Kinkish length of almost six and a half minutes. Whatever...it fits in with the rest of the album like Woody Allen at a Jay-Z concert, so we'll just call it an aberration and move on to describing the album as a whole.

Arthur, even with the sometimes hypercritical nature of Ray's lyrics, is simply an album of wonderous moments. With this album, the Kinks construct a sort of alternate reality that sounds completely and totally unconnected to what else was happening in 1969. Far from being in any way influenced by acid rock, or by superdistorted proto-metal, or by limp singer-songwriterism, Arthur is refreshingly compact and lucid in a sea of modal jams rivaled in longevity only by the waiting line at the Woodstock port-a-potties. This album's closest useful relative is Tommy, but while Tommy was psychedelic, spiritual, and frankly, flakier than a box of instant potatoes (and so proudly a 'rock opera' to boot), Arthur seems almost genius in its understatement, clarity, and good taste. Ray isn't necessarily very accommodating to Arthur's choices of a 'straight' existence, but he sympathizes with it and makes our hero a likable, living character who, in the end, has just had a sad life. He's, you know, Human. Not like Tommy, who was a cartoonish, soulless prop generated half from old comic books, half from every religious tradition on the face of the Earth, and half from Pete Townshend's repressed gay fantasies.

Musically, this album has few peers in terms of melodic, memorable, and (again) tasteful advancement of the miniature plotlines. They rock harder than they have since Kink Kontroversy, producing a couple of real trophies of glorious crunch ('Brainwashed', 'Mr. Churchill Says'), an irresponsibly catchy, ecstatic surf-rock classic ('Victoria'), a miniature pop opera in several movements ('Shangri La'), gorgeous ballads ('Young and Innocent Days', the soul-wrenching 'Some Mother's Son'), and a couple of tunes so happy they buoy their respective sides from being overburdened by heavy manners ('Driving' and 'She Bought a Hat'). It's so well balanced that no only does 'Australia' stick out like a broken leg, it's actually a real shame when the album ends. Though I've heard this one a thousand and a half times, I actually feel I want to listen to it again once it comes around to the end again.

I considered going song-by-song here, but since I'm already reaching nearly two pages and have much more to say, I'll drop that idea like Mariah Carey from a $100 million record contract. Instead, I'll simply express sadness that the Kinks never again got even close to the consistent greatness they show here, Arthur marking the peak of the band's musical growth cycle that stretched back to Kinks. Even more brilliantly, they sound easily recognizable as the Kinks here, even to someone who has only heard 'You Really Got Me' and 'Waterloo Sunset'. They just got to be as good as they could possibly be. Mick Avory plays his drums with near-perfection, going nuts when called for and simply carrying the beat the rest of the time, and the guitars, pianos, and voices form a cohesive, organic unit that just sounds....fucking good, if you care to know. Plus, there's still enough rough edges left over to leave it sounding like the real Kinks and not some bionic Kinkernators, either.

To end up, I'd just like to tip my hat to one of the more unsung songs on Arthur, and that's the anti-war ballad 'Some Mother's Son'.  This song presents what I feel to be one of the most powerful pictures of the horrors of war I've ever heard, written, sung, or spoken. Ray's point is that people die in war, and everyone who does is 'some mother's son', whatever side they're on. All dead soldiers look the same. Moreover, the idea that mothers only remember their dead sons as they looked before they go off to experience the horrors of war is somehow comforting to me. Who wants to I'm no General Patton or anything, but I'm not sure how smart it is for someone to 'glance up at the sun' and 'dream of games you play while you are young' while sitting in a trench, but still...this is one powerful song, and I get goosebumps every time I hear it.

Capn's Final Word: The Kinks at the top of their powers, conquering a concept that sounds ponderous but ends up making a lot of sense. Putting a strong melody or two on each song does, too.

Glenn  cuzzino@aol.com   Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: Arthur, the album, didn▓t do very well at the time of its release, and very much like Arthur, struggled to be heard. It is a testament to the breadth and depth of Ray Davies▓ vision that time has only amplified the power that lies between the grooves of this extraordinary album. It needs to be amplified, because the power in these songs is sometimes very quiet indeed. ⌠Young and Innocent Days■ sums it up best, as the Kinks long for ⌠the way I used to look at life, soft white dreams with sugar-coated outside■. In reality, sugar coated delights are hidden all over this album, but beneath the sugar is some real food for thought. A freakin' classic.

 

Still waiting on Part II of this Ray Davies anti-music industry rant-o-matic, most famous for featuring the band's last major hit (the number one 'Lola'), which vaulted the Kinks back from their four-year chart exile, winning hearts and minds who like to chant idiotic things ('La la la la!') while hearing songs about sex with transvestites. Of course, anyone who knows Ray knows that he couldn't go down so easily just giving us a 'record album' filled with 'unreleated songs' about 'nothing', he has to go and conceptualize everything into whatever is straightjacketing his anus at the time.  This time around, apparently after had such great chart success with Village Green and Arthur (heh), he decides to give a 'scathing account' of a young kid's induction into the world of Big Rock 'n' Roll so unshocking that it wouldn't cause most people to bat an eye in a sandstorm. What? People get ripped off in rock 'n' roll? It's really all about money? It crushes your creativity and makes you into a slave?The FUCK you say, Ray! Well, gawwww-leeee, I thought all those promoters and business managers were pure white saints, honest as Abe.

The most interesting thing about Lola is the title song itself.  Again, most people miss the point of the song in the grand scheme of the album, wondering what the hell a dolt's love affair with that person who 'looks like a woman but talks like Ed Asner and has more stubble than the Unabomber') has to do with the music industry and whatever. Here, have a look, I'll clue you in. See, before 'Lola', all the songs are about our protagonist wanting to break out of his hometown ('The Contenders'), wanting to write a song and get it published ('Denmark Street') and feeling bummed out about being unemployed ('Get Back In Line'). After 'Lola', everything's about Number One hits and 'Top Of the Pops' and all the money that's getting run around all over the joint. See, 'Lola' is the guy's hit! And I think it's more than a little bit fitting that the 'Lola' single itself was a bernanza bongo bongo woing woing hit and sprang the Kinks loose around the moneygoround again.  It's only fitting to have a song that goes to a fictional Number One reach the real Number One, isn't it? And man, it's one catchy song, all major chords and big-'la-la's' and a delightfully clueless protagonist ('now I ain't dumb'...sez you) and that cool guitar tone that Ray and Dave have been slinging out since Village Green.

The rest of Lola isn't nearly as memorable as all that, but it's at least a workmanlike, halfway enjoyable bunch of tracks that show craftiness if not real inspiration. 'The Contenders' boogies with a rare Kinks bluesiness and some great piano banging by John Losling, and seems to end extremely quickly. Dave begins to claw his way back from B-side exile with nice Ron Wood-y vocals on 'The Strangers' and the gloriously dirty-distorted rocker 'Rats', which sounds like '72-era Aerosmith, except Dave doesn't sound like he's just sucked in a lungful of nitrous oxide all the time. The goony, charming rocker 'Apeman', taking the Village Green anti-modernism to the extreme of wishing for devo-lution  shares its arrangement with 'Lola' but stops short of stealing its hooks, but still sounds strong, and the band can still kick out the ol' jams when necessary (the desperate 'Powerman'). Many of the remaining songs serve mostly to advance the story, and fall into those sorts of drunken singalong-y things that Ray likes to fall back on when his rock sense begins to fail him. 'Get Back In Line' has a nice melody, but it doesn't sound like much after 'Shangri-La' (which it closely resembles), and 'Top of the Pops' is just a dumb 'Louie Louie' copy.  Same goes for the quieter 'lemme outta this world' tunes 'A Long Way From Home' (cool duetted vocals, not enough of a melody) and 'This Time Tomorrow' (zippy Beatlesque piano-rocker), which, to me, always seem to get overshadowed by the better songs like a breasty slut's chunky best friend.

Lola is very listenable (lord knows I've heard it probably three dozen times this week), and the storyline is easy to follow, if a bit banal, and the Kinks still have that essential dashed-offedness to their sound that's very charming.  It's important to remember, however, that this is also the album during which the Kinks stopped their 6-year stretch of (almost) constant improvement. Lola isn't bad, but it sure isn't as good as Arthur or VG, and from here it starts to get clearer and clearer those days aren't coming back. They'd spend the next year or two coasting off the fumes of their late-60's peak, retaining enough of a clip to keep putting out more good-but-unremarkable albums like this one before losing all forward movement altogether with their rotten egg schlock opera period beginning in 1973.

 Capn's Final Word:  'Take this job and shove it' gets Ray a promotion, commercially. The rest is listenable, unrefined hackwork, but its decent.

Soundtrack albums are usually the stomping ground of the schlocky orchestral  instrumental and the even schlockier sappy ballad, and while Ray Davies avoided the landmines with a deft dexterity on Arthur (which may as well not have been a soundtrack at all), on Percy he seems to have a knack for falling into each and every pitfall he possibly can. Apparently, Percy is a man who, thanks to modern science, has a real-life detachable penis (thus explaining the Adam-with-two-sided-tape-on-his-willy fig-leaf cover art), or a penis transplant, or penis enhancement, or something having to do with making his Tom Jones bigger than it otherwise was. Well, since Ray is fiercely British and Brits have notoriously small 'self-images', he was somewhat against the whole idea of a man screwing with what God gave him to screw with, as enunciated on the opening ballad 'God's Children'. This song sez things like 'we gotta get back to the way God made us' and how modern science has no right to make people into machines. Apparently he's seen Tetsuo: Iron Man too. So maybe the producers of Percy might've taken a few minutes to listen to Village Green before giving the reigns of their soundtrack album to a confessed Luddite like Ray Davies. Maybe. Saved 'em a few bucks. (God knows if it was actually ever aired, though, so maybe they just fucked up all around).

Anyway, the song blows anyway - a bunch of lame-ass whining over piano chords too sappy for Elton John at his most pliant. What's worse is that it seems that Ray has now begun to take the easy way out on a lot of his lyrics. While before he might've said things with a modicum of vagueness or a unique viewpoint, now he frequently sounds as if he's merely 'playing' himself, following a lazy lyrical formula and sticking like a suckerfish to a rapidly narrowing philosophy of the world that lacks all the charm of his former punkish roasts or misfit celebrations. Now, more often than not, he merely recites his slogans and vignettes as if the act of saying something, and getting all puffed up about at while you're doing it, equals actually, you know...saying something.

The rest of Percy doesn't much justify its purchase, either.  This might sound heartless, but 'The Way Love Used to Be' is so sappy it makes 'God's Children' sound like Biohazard. Luckily it's only two dinky minutes long, but Ray still finds time to slather some over-buttered strings on there so it sounds like the theme music to On Golden Pond (with That Chick Who Used to Be Hot, Became a Commie, and finally Retired a Bloodless Capitalist Pig and her kick-ass dad, plus that human Magic Fingers bed Katherine Hepburn). The instrumentals, a version of 'Lola' that has some neat guitar crunch but absolutely no point, the main melody of Running 'Round Town' steals Lola's same chord progression (again), and 'Completely' is just some mistake-ridden, bluesy warm-up licks masquerading as a real track.. The ones with words aren't too much better for their presence...'Animals In The Zoo' is a ripoff of 'Apeman' thematically and Bo Diddley musically. It continues, with a few tracks achieving passability, 'Moments' is nice and Dylan-y, the Who-ish breakdown on 'Whip Lady' is delightfully angry, and 'Dreams' makes it sound like the Kinks are commiserating with the Beach Boys as formerly influential Sixties pop stars left off the early 70's cool bus, forced to ride in the short one with the Jo Jo Gunnes and Wizzards of the world, the one that smells like old shoes and tapioca pudding. You know the one. The one no one bought concert tickets to.

Also, just as an ending, 'Just Friends' sounds like Brian Ferry doing a straight cover of Judy Garland as performed by the Mantovani strings. Simply deeee-spicable, friends and creditors. Like taking a swig of root beer and realizing you've been given someone's Cope cup.

Capn's Final Word:  This ain't no Kinks album. It's a soundtrack, and Ray seems to have been replaced with a mechanical version of his old self. The tool.

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Before continuing their rotten free-fall into concept album hell with the Preservation series and the rest of their weak ilk, the Kinks grant us two last reprises with their rootsy, sloppily chaming and drunken early 70's duo of Muswell Hillbillies and Everyone's In Showbiz, also marking their last two kiss-offs to reality before descending into the immature hell of Ray's fever dreams.  They're sorta akin to Kink-y versions of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street in that they sound like they were done completely live and in an intoxicated haze of unchallenging 'roots' music performed in lieu of something more daring, but don't get me wrong here...these sure as hell ain't as good as the Stones' heat-wave carburetor grease masterpiece. For one thing, 'roots' mean two different things to the different bands - to the Stones it means gospel, country blues, and R&B, songs about God and picking yourself up from the gutter and freeing the Sweet Black Angel, and the Stones didn't sound like they were merely going through the motions, either...they sounded as if they were clinging on their very last string before flying apart in a dark cloud of excess and acute schizophrenia disease (and that assessment turned out to be not far from the truth). The Kinks were merely teetering on the edge of complete mediocrity, taking one last look around before taking the plunge. Besides, Dixieland, country-folk, and pub tunes don't pack nearly the same punch for me as blues and gospel do (not to mention that the Stones are miles beyond the Kinks as players).  The Kinks sound like they're just too lazy to play anything but more of their Ethanol Circus sideshow music, but do it sloppily and loosely enough to make it sound a bit more fittingly grungey than it did on albums like Face to Face, where the same stuff (with better lyrics) was presented a bit too well-mannered and velvet to convince the scruffy fans. That's certainly not the problem here, where Ray seems to have taken his anti-modern stance to the extreme of actually reconfiguring his band to make them sound better fit for the 1920's than the 1970's. To listen to '20th Century Man', you might think Ray's on the edge of changing his name to Brother Jebediah and joining a clan of Mennonites out in the Kansas hills. Sheeit, they even hire a backing jazz band to expand their 'repotoire' into Dixieland and other forms of music not popular for 100 years now. Heh. I bet new Kinks contract-holders RCA took one look at Muswell Hillbillies when it came out and swallowed their bowler hats. 'Lola' this is not.

Luckily for us, the ol' truck might be rusty and rattle like Skeletor in an earthquake, but Muswell Hillbillies is an easy ride nonetheless. It's full of good humor and a lighter tone than the Kinks have ever taken before, whether singing hoary warnings about 'Alcohol' or exhorting us to 'Fer Chrissakes, Have A Cuppa Tea'. Ray's as paranoid as ever, but he's funny paranoid rather than whiny paranoid.  His band's ability to make everything sound effortlessly dashed off (and considering how unchallenging most of this music is, that's probably exactly how it was) is suitably charming, and can drag me through some gnarly low points like 'Holloway Jail' and 'Here Come The Men In Grey', so forgettable I'm still surprised when I look at them on the album sleeve. 'What? There's a song called 'Holiday' on here? When the fuck did that happen? Maybe my Immaculate Collection CD mated with it sometime back a few months ago and now we have a little bit of chromosomal blundering going on. What'd explain why my Sade Diamond Life record has a song called 'Meat Hook Sodomy' on it now.

If hick-y music is good enough for you the way it's good enough for me, then Muswell should be just fine to slip on and drown yourself in beers and deep-fried Mars bars to while screaming bloody murder at the game of footy on the telly up there. Be forewarned that the only true 'rock' song here is '20th Century Man', which is not probably one of the better ones, and that 'Oklahoma U.S.A.' is just as sloppy-weepy as 'God's Children' was, but somehow almost brings me to tears anyway, possibly because I went to college there and any British person who makes themselves feel better by fantasizing that they live there (along with Doris Day and Erroll Flynn) instead of the Home Islands has to be one sad individual indeed. Lemme tell you, Oklahoma is packed full of some of the nicest people you'll ever meet (near-retarded in their politeness, which is 100% genuine, by the way), but the longer I was there, the more I began to think it was just one big Biosphere experiment to see if hominids could live on the Moon. Except the Moon has better access to porn. The naivety of 'Oklahoma USA' is absolutely moving, like a young kid asking what happens when you kill all the missles and win the game Missile Command.

 Capn's Final Word: Ray taking his 'back to the past' movement to a boozy, goony new level of unseriousness, but a raucous good time is had anyhow.

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Randy Doak     Your Rating: A-
Any Short Comments?: Love your writing.  I would disagree with you that everything was downhill after Lola.  Muswell Hillbillies deserves a serious listen. I would rate it higher than Lola and Arthur but not in the same league with VGPS. In my book, the last great Kinks album. In turns funny, sad, maudlin and intoxicating.
 

Anyone remember Showbiz Pizza? That ripoff of Chuck E. Cheese's cardboard-pizza, three-second supermarket parking lot rides and creepy, creaky animatronics schtick that was virtually guaranteed to have your hotwaired 5-year old puking up the three gallons of Mountain Dew he consumed in the last hour on the console of the Bop-a-Mole before the night was over? It's damn near impossible for me to hear the word 'Showbiz' and not think of the time the rich kid in my kindergarten, Ryan Weineger, with whom I'd shared maybe two words previously, invited me there for a birthday party with a bunch of kids I didn't know and plied my friendship with unlimited numbers of free tokens. He might've just been being nice (rich kids' parents tend to overdo it when they're doing that), and I never figured out what that weird little kid was all about, but I accepted gladly regardless. I must've played Gorf a thousand fucking times that day, even though I had little grasp of the point of the game and the fine motor skills of Teddy Kennedy at an open-bar Harvard alumni ball. One of the cherished memories of my childhood, especially considering it was harder to get one lousy quarter out of my Dad for Pac Man than it is getting a free sample out of Fort Knox. Oh, and fuck that fucking sadist in the Gorilla suit behind the gift counter for not giving me the benefit of an extra three measly Skee Ball tickets that would have allowed me to get the fake plastic wristwatch instead of the two fake plastic spider rings that hurt my fingers anyway. Fucking dirty damn ape.

You'd think by looking at the vomit-inducing Day Glo cover of Everybody's In Showbiz that Ray had finally broken down and given us his Glam Rock album, but you'd be wrong on both counts. It ain't glam, and the last time I checked with my Rock bible, this ain't any of the other stuff either. Nope, this is still more of that piano-driven Guinness redneck-fusion that filled up the enjoyable Muswell Hillbillies, except with even more horns than before, except jokes are never as funny the second time you hear them. Some songs are virtual sisters to counterparts on Muswell, like how 'Unreal Reality' cops 'Acute Scizophrenia Paranoia Blues' (never one of the highlights of that album anyway) and the protagonist of 'Celluloid Heroes' repeats the wish of the one on 'Oklahoma USA' in wishing her life was a 'non-stop Hollywood movie show', and some songs seem like they exist for no good reason than Ray hadn't yet written a song about them yet ('Motorway', a straight-up country tune about highway fatigue).  The rest of the songs aren't quite absolute parallels, but they sound absolutely and uncomfortably familiar anyway due to their paint-by-numbers chord sequences and well-worn lyrical subject matter about life on the road. Some of the tunes are nice, and I get a giddy feeling out of 'Look On the Sunny Side' that's probably not healthy, but a lot of this bores the crap outta my crap-place. Tour rock? Guh...let's go through the motions anyway, since Ray and the boys did, too. Yes, there's the one about the highway, and then there's the one about the hotel room ('Sitting In My...', which is actually pretty good as it revisits the feel of some of Ray's old autobiographical alienation classics like 'Waterloo Sunset'), and the one about general tour loathing ('Here Comes Yet Another Day'). Again, having written reviews for over three years now, having to cover yet another album that whines about how terrible and alienating being on tour is ranks somewhere between an Old El Paso Picante Sauce enema and sitting through an episode of that kids' show with Britney Spears' little ho-in-training sister as activities I'd like not to have to repeat again, but here it is. The Kinks are predictably less macho about their 'life of a rock 'n' roller' stories than, say, Led Zeppelin, but all this talk about the monotony and boredom of the road sure doesn't bode well for the live half of this double-album set, does it?

Right. The Kinks continue their streak of uninteresting live albums with the second disc of Everybody's in Showbiz. They bring their horny toad jazz backing section and take most of their material from Muswell Hillbillies but seem to do an awful job of choosing the right ones ('Skin and Bones', 'Acute Schizophrenia', and that damn 'Holiday' song, which I still can't remember a single note of, even under pain of death and dismemberment as a 'respected' album reviewer who should really be able to, you know, just know these kinds of things), and similarly fail miserably at their selections from the Lola album - 'Top of the Pops' but no 'Apeman' takes balls, but to include only a small snippet of an audience-chanted 'Lola' as a fadeout track just takes complete disregard for your audience. That said, 'Muswell Hillbilly' is damn good, as is 'Alcohol' and a charging 'Brainwashed', and they perform the bonus track 'Til the End of the Day' identically to the way it was on Kelvin Hall. How many other Sixties bands could play a song exactly 100% the same way in 1971 as they did in 1965, anyway? Somewhere between zero and two, I'd be willing to wager. There's something to be said for that, I think.

The final result of Everybody's In Showbiz, despite being twice as long as Muswell Hillbillies, is somewhat diminished by the sheer lack of originiality in the studio record. I suppose you could count 'Celluloid Heroes' as one of the band's better post-peak tracks as these things go, as it mistily envisions how different dead (and near-dead) stars would react to your walking callously over their star on the Hollywood Boulevard. It sounds, once again, damn much like an Elton John song, especially in response to 'Candle In the Wind' of the same year, except Ray's voice sounds mocking and put-on compared with Elton's earnest baritione, and I'd doubt that '72-era Elton would let his song drag on to this degree. Ah well, I can be sentimental, too, so I'll give this one the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, the studio songs mostly lack any hint of freshness, and the live album is forgettable, but I'd say there's not much to really hate here. They simply didn't put a helluva lot of effort into it. That wouldn't be the problem with their next several albums, not story-wise anyway, and that would be the problem, precisely. The more thought the Kinks put into their 70's albums, the worse they got. Like tampons and microwave ovens, it's funny how these things work.

 Capn's Final Word:  A cruddy live album and what sound like a bunch of Muswell outtakes, which sounded like outtakes in the first place. Still, it could be stupendously worse.

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I bet a lot of you just couldn't keep your pants on, waiting for how I'd lay into the unquestioned nadir of Mr. Ray Davies as a rock 'n' roll act, his colossally misguided two-volume rock opera that seemed to not only repeat everything he'd already said, it repeated it in the most idiotic, convoluted, tuneless way possible. It's as if Ray has completely separated himself mentally from the idea of the Kinks as a band (I heard once the original bass player, Pete Quaife, left in 1970, Ray's idea of his group as a unit went down the poop chute faster than a Taco Bueno Deluxe Combo Burrito), rather relating to them as a group of session musicians there only to cater to every niggling little rock-opera bullshit whim that popped into that triangular head of his. Having a look at the bodaciously huge collection of scruffy 'family' members there on the cover, thus comprising the 'cast' of this shitbomb, one has little wonder that this album and its next two follow-ups sound like they sprang from the forehead of Charlie Manson himself.

The idea behind Preservation, not that I profess to understand it in any way myself, is that a certain currently-evil Mr. Flash wishes to profanate the holy Village Green (groan),  and is opposed by a certain currently-good Mr. Black, a champion of the 'little people' and warrior against the greed of the capitalist Flash. There are also comeos by Johnny Thunder (yeah, that one from VG), Lady Genevieve, and the Tramp, but they don't do anything interesting, either. Now, though I have no proof of this, I suspect a certain Messrs. Blonde, Pink, and Blue will show up at some point and a veritable orgy of bloodbathing will ensue, complete with lots of impossible-to-achieve slow-motion rolling dives set to an endless parade of great, catchy, semi-obscure 70's-vintage Top 40 tunes not including anything on this album. And I hear an ear gets cut off. Don't worry, dude. I can get you an ear. I can get you an ear before 3:00 this afternoon...WITH large drips of green earwax, too!

You'll want to remove a part of your body, too, (possibly though gnawing) before Preservation, Act 1 drags its sorry ass through 47 minutes of tuneless dicksnot passing for Ray's 'story'. Except, whoops! There's no story on this one! See, Ray was still trying to figure out what the fuck was going to happen with these cartoonish mental constructs of his when RCA began to threaten broken fingers and missing guitar-playing brothers if he didn't cough up a new R'n'R record for the 1973 Christmas shopping season, so Ray rushed out this patch job, consisting mostly of 'introductions' to the characters who would then, you know, be given a plot next year. Right. That's kinda like releasing two super-bloody karate movies starring a tall, blonde former makeup cover model, and having the first one advance the story not a single Ving Rhames.

Anyway, it's the Kinks we're talking about, and not Jackie Brown (still, believe me, the best of the Tarantulino movies, though Pulp Fiction is entertaining. I always like assrape scenes, which is why I've got The Wiggles' Rock 'n' Roll Singin' and Dancin' Boy's Skinnydippin' Sleepover Camp on a constant loop in my living room.) The problem with this damn album is that Ray's just as uninterested in making his album sound decent musically as he was on the last few albums, except this one is all deadly serious and oxygen-deprived, as if letting anyone crack a smile during the recording of this 'epic' might disspell the 'magic' of the story. Except, like I said, there's no story. BERRRK! Thanks for playing! I have less than zero interest in viewing the lyric sheet of this porcine fornicating device , so don't blame me for not going around and quoting lazy crap like 'Cricket' or shedding more light on Mr. Flash's dastardly deeds on 'Demolition'.

One thing here, I want to make clear...looking at the track listing and seeing songs with titles like 'Demolition' might lead you to believe there's some hard-ass cracker rockin', or a title like 'Sitting In the Midday Sun' might bring up memories of 'Sunny Afternoon', but don't be fooled...this album has NONE OF THAT. Holy crap, I'll say it again...THIS ALBUM DOES NOT ROCK. THIS ALBUM DOES NOT HAVE GOOD BALLADS ON IT. So 'Midday Sun' has the same vocal harmonies as 'Waterloo Sunset'. You know what? Go fucking buy Something Else then, and get the real thing. They all cost the same. You're not somehow getting a better deal because you're buying the shittier album (believe me, it usually works in the opposite direction), so why not save yourself the pain of having to sit and wonder why your Kinks have started sounding like Blood, Sweat, and Tears with half their fingers chopped off. Gawd, Ray even goes for those terribly obvious 'stage' treatments like joining the scene at daybreak, set by the godforsaken Broadway massed-chorus line moaning instrumental 'Morning Song' and the 'big' anthemic ballad 'Daylight' to tell us of the daily lives of his beloved Village Greenians. Except we wouldn't have known they were supposed to have been Village Greenians had Ray not tacked on the 'instant libretto' opening track 'Preservation', which pretty much summarizes the entire album all at once so you can go off to do something more pleasant, like scrape that sticky orange stuff up from the Linoleum behind your crapper. The album then takes an inexcusable and inexplicable detour for the next several songs (yes, all shitty shit shit too, and Ray quotes 'Lola' with bald-faced premeditation on 'There's a Change In the Weather'). Ray's point seems to be 'old = good, new = bad', never fleshed out much more than the fact that he likes his actors dead, his rebels aging, his TV loud, and his gays FUH-LAMING!! The rest of the album consists of Mr. Flash going 'Narr!! Narr!! I'll GET YOU my PRETTIES!' and the townspeople going 'We represent the lollypop guild! The lollypop guild!' And I have a headache and want to lay down, even though I know Ray's stolen the melody from 'Where Are They Now' lock, schlock, and barrel from Village Green (the album, not the town), but my mind is so polluted I can't even spare the brain capacity to figure out from which song. Dangling red herrings and just-vague-enough lyrical couplets abound, so the Kink Faithful can pour over the lyrics and X-Ray to figure out just WHO Johnny Thunder was supposed to be or WHAT the vicar was doing or WHY anyone would want to listen to this thing, but to me those people are just folks with nasty orange stuff stuck to the Linoleum behind their crappers.

 Capn's Final Word:  Goddamn it, whatever. Ray came back with another volume, twice as long and therefore just as awful, the next year. I can't be forced to make sense of Ray Davies if he doesn't even have the wherewithal to make sense of himself.

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Bryan     Your Rating: A-
Any Short Comments?: I don't really understand why everyone tears this album to shreds. To my ears, and granted I'm an enormous Kinks fan, it's totally warm and inviting, with a few genuine classics (Sweet Lady Genevieve, Where are they Now). Ray's melodicism hasn't left him at all, nor has his charming vocals and character studies - every internet reviewer I read hates this record, but at one point I actually considered both acts of Preservation my favorite Kinks project. Don't be turned off due to all the negative comments made here and other places; if you love Ray Davies' sensibility, you'll definately find enough material on this record to warrant it's purchase.

Jose      Your Rating: B
Any Short Comments?: I have to agree with Bryan. In my opinion Preservation 1 is, after muswell Hillbillies, the best Kinks album of the 70's. "Sweet Lady Genevieve" is, by the way one of my favourite songs by the group. Sure half of the album isn't that good if you compare to the best work of the Kinks (to write a song about such awful sport as  cricket is doesn't help.
If you like the kinks buy at leat the first part of Preservation. Part 2 is a bit on the boring side (although it has songs like "when a solution comes" or "Mirror of love".

 

Ray Davies never was further out on a rickety limb in a hurricaine wearing a razorblade suitjacket than he was when he was busily cranking out the unlovable mismash called Preservation, hereby completed with the release of its two-disc second set. While the first Preservation had about as much plot advancement as a Tuesday episode of Days of Our Lives, the second is crammed full to seams bursting with the stuff.  Our ol pal Flash is about ready to pull a Donald Trump on the peaceful environs of the ol' Village Green and the little folks who inhabit the town are hopping around, madder than a short-sheeted Yao Ming. Part Two, in case you care, sees the dominance of the capitalist Mr. Flash (who's now some sort of a world leader instead of just a real estate developer) threatened by a people's revolution led by the socialist Mr. Black. Black wins and sticks ol' Flash into the pokey, and wouldn't ya know it...as soon as he touches his foot into office he begins to exert his own iron-handed rule by restricting gaydom and self-expression to 'stop the decline of public morals in the Village Green'. Flash has a change of heart about his wicked Wal-Mart-y ways and atones for his sins before being ceremoniously whacked by Black, whose tyranny grows as he shuts down TV stations, jacks up the price of gas, and kicks off his cultural revolution. Huh. That's it? Over an hour and a half of blathering and that's IT? That power corrupts equally, either through greed for money (Flash) or greed for power (Black)? And only 'the people' remain unsullied by it all? Even though they followed Black in the first place? Jeez, now I know what they mean by 'talkin' a lot and sayin' nothin'. The Who said it a thousand times better with two minutes of ARP synthesizer, a scream, and 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss' than the Kinks do on this entire wordy screed, which is musically, lyrically, and philosophically inept. Sure, there's references to hoary old stuff like 'the sins of the government increases the apathy of the people' ('Nobody Gives a Damn') or 'Seeing yourself as you really are just before dying' ('Flash's Dream'), but it's all done way too superficially to make much of an impression. Ray seems like he wants us to be impressed simply because he's made a Rock Opera and is Saying Something, but it's not much of an opera and he's not saying anything much.

Of course, much of it wouldn't make a rat's turd of sense if not for Ray's frequent 'Announcement's from a sort of newscaster, giving us play-by-play of.the plot advancements. Without them, I'd be more lost than Anne Heche on sunshine acid in the middle of Kazakhstan because the plot advancement does NOT happen during the songs. They're the exclusive territory of Ray's characters talking to each other (and themselves) about how they feel about this or that, and it's all completely ridiculous. The plot moves in big jumps, then crawls for three songs, then there's another 'happening' and so on and so on for several dozen songs. It's not like we even get much if a deep commitment to any of the characters, since only 'the people' are presented positively. The amount of time spent on Mr. Flash's character is ridiculously high (the man's a greedy jerk, okay!), and lots of characters introduced on Act 1 are completely forgotten by the time Act 2 rolled around. Anyway, I've seen better storytelling on the back of a box of Cocoa Crispies, and anyone who enters into Preservation waiting to have their mind blown by a whale of an imaginative story is going to find themselves longing with a misty tear in their eye for 'K