The Kinks, a band that is both revered and forgotten. The older kids think of You Really Got Me or Lola and the queers love thatWaterloo Sunset. Sprinkle a couple other greatest hit tracks or a few lost oldies weekend songs in and you think you’ve got them figured. They ain’t the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or that influential right?
Then one day you take the early flight home from San Diego and…wait that’s Old School…but one day you listen and you drift and you drink a little cheap wine and it grows in you and its grows on you and you learn to respect all the “ditties” and the colloquialisms and more than anything spirit of it all.
Ray Davies is a brilliant man and an amazing lyricist. Each song seems to be a story and he doesn’t ditch the rhymes or the words to make it work he just fits them in.
The first real time I really heard all of the brilliance of a Kinks record was Lola vs. Powerman but it wasn’t until today and more specifically this early evening underneath a near full moon in my purple living room that I realized how much of a genius he and the band really are.
Most people who have any taste know the song, Village Green Preservation Society, and maybe Picture Book from a commercial or too but I think this album hasn’t been given the love that it deserves. Where would Blur or Okkervil River be today without Ray Davies and albums like this?
You may feel some songs don’t stand strong but they are fundamental to the whole of the project with songs like Village Green Preservation Society, Picture Book, Johnny Thunder, Last of the Steam Powered Trains, Big Sky, Sitting by the Riverside, and Starstruck being the load-bearing beams.
I call out to you now to sign me up any day to “save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety,” or to rock out to the blues tribute of Last of the Steam Powered Trains. Melodies and British sensibilities abound on this album and if you, the brilliant anthropologist of great music, has never sat down with this album and given it a deserved listen then may I suggest so? No! Wait, I’m an American I god-damns that you do, otherwise you’re an unpatrtiot!
999/1000
-Rubles
Tags: the kinks, village green
