With the one obvious exception, the originals (and there are a surprising number of them) aren't interesting either. The brief instrumental "Revenge" is so primitive that I actually find it kinda cute and endearing, and "Stop Your Sobbing" is a decent stab at sounding like the Fab Four, but the other three lesser tracks just ooze awkwardness. Fortunately for all, though, there is the classic, the song that would have ensured (at the least) the band a place in rock history among the greatest one-hit wonders of all time (alongside The Seeds, The Kingsmen and other Nuggets greats). "You Really Got Me" may or may not have invented the concept of heavy rock with its devastating five-note riff (and accidentally awesome guitar tone), but there's no denying that it's one of the greatest songs of the early 60's, one of the greatest songs of the band's career and a classic that sounds rough and powerful many decades after initial release. And don't forget that solo, a glorious burst of sloppy (in a good way) enthusiasm that probably inspired a legion of punk rockers more than a decade later.

(As an aside, I must confess that, for the longest time, I thought the line, "You've got me so I can't sleep at night," was actually "You've got me so I can't see that knife," which led me to think that the song was about a woman having a guy under her control so much that she was in a position to kill him. Silly me.)

Unfortunately, that song's all that can be seriously recommended from the original release of the album. I actually have the expanded version, with multiple bonus tracks; some of these will be covered in my review of Kinksize/Kinkdom, and of the rest, the major standout is the "Got Me" clone, "All Day and All of the Night," which rules at least 90% as much as its predecessor. Funny how the band sounded so awesome when doing one specific type of song and so ... not awesome otherwise. Anyway, of the other non-Kinkdom bonus tracks, the alternate cover of "Too Much Monkey Business" is moderately recommendable, but otherwise, meh. Just get the best songs on a compilation somewhere, and ignore the rest, bonus tracks or no.

Not surprisingly, the songs that sound best are the ones where Ray sounds the most self-assured as a songwriter, meaning that he's not blatantly using other artists (and popular styles) of the day as a blatant crutch. Well, ok, the 'softer' guitar lines of "Tired of Waiting for You" sound a little Byrds-ish (while Dave pounds out his rougher chords with glee), but the melody is totally unlike anything else I've heard from that period, and Ray's singing and lyrics run the gamut of emotions of a cheated lover so effectively that it becomes much easier to understand how he'd be able to make the big jump within just a couple of years' time. "Something Better Beginning" is also quite nice, with some nice shaky (in a good way) vocals and a deep echoing production (with guitars that sound like they'd be perfectly at home with the harpsichords that would have filled this song had it been written two years later) that complements a melody that's full of twists and resolutions that most songwriters (including Davies himself on the rest of this album) would have killed for.

Unfortunately, while none of the other originals suck, none of them are even close to the two highlights. The opening "Look for me Baby" is an awkward R&B number that sounds a bit too much like an average track on Kinks, and the multiple Rays singing in the background aren't very impressive, but at the same time, it feels much more developed than the average track from that album. Dave does a surprisingly acceptable job of singing a few up-tempo numbers, especially in "Got My Feet on the Ground," a fun piece of boogie rock. The rest of the tracks basically fall into the "average pop ballad" category, meaning they're nice when on and completely out-of-mind when the album's done.

This album, especially in the context of its predecessor, presents The Kinks as a giant enigma. Obviously Ray could write very, VERY good songs ... so why weren't there more of them by this point? Were The Kinks a mediocre band capable of pulling out a totally solid number only about one time in five, or were they a great band in embryo that just needed some time and patience to fully develop? Obviously you can guess my answer, but based on just these first two albums alone, it's still a bit of a puzzle. Of course, the bonus tracks on this CD give a strong hint, as mentioned in the next review...

This collection doesn't start off very well, truth be told. The opening "Who'll be the Next in Line" is a better attempt at generic up-tempo 60's pop rock than similar attempts on Kinda Kinks, but that's not saying a whole lot; the band's cover of "Louie Louie" is shockingly bland and uninteresting (in theory, no band should have been able to do a better version of this song than "You Really Got Me"-era Kinks, but this version is as stiff and uninspiring as can be); "I've Got That Feeling" is pleasant and decently written but unnecessary; and "Everybody's Gonna be Happy" is only particularly interesting in the unusual way Ray sings, "Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii know, Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii know." Starting in track five, though, the band stops sounding like a weak mix of other, better bands of the day, and starts sounding like a band that can actually mark out its own identity (and do it decently well). Two tracks ("I Gotta Go Now," "Things are Getting Better") that were found amongst the Kinks bonus tracks are as primitive as I'd expect (especially lyrically), but they also have a delightful bit of whimsy and fun in the vocal harmonies, so that's at least something.

The next eight tracks, then, are so much better than the bulk of Kinda Kinks that it's hilarious. The most infamous highlight of these is "See My Friends," where Ray goes all out in trying to replicate an Indian sound in both his singing and in the guitar playing (no sitar here, but it sure sounds like one), which would probably make him the first person in British pop music to have done so unless somebody can come up with some obscure example to prove me wrong. I like all of the rest of these tracks as well, but the standouts for me would have to be "Well Respected Man" (the first of Ray's many, many character sketches, and one that fittingly describes somebody whose life isn't quite as great as it looks on the surface), "I Need You" (another rewrite of "You Really Got Me," but which sounds absolutely pummeling) and "Set Me Free" (which merges power chords with emotive balladry in a delightful way that probably would have sucked had it been written twenty years later but which sounds like blissful in this 60's context). And, well, the others from this group are nice too.

The two Kontroversy tracks are a lot fun, and (surprise) are better than the album they accompany (both could have gone very well on Face to Face). "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" is a fun sketch of a guy who dresses way too well to be fully straight, and "Sitting On My Sofa" does stoned proto-psychedelia as well as any band could have in 1965. And finally, the album ends on a very high point with the lone Face to Face representative, a track that captures the alienation, self-hatred and nihilism of classic punk as well as any track I've heard from the mid-60's. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" has arguably the best angry delivery (from Dave, no less; at last, he got some control of his voice) in the whole Kinks catalogue, and the way it builds into a melodic, yet convincing screaming fit in the chorus (before quickly shifting back into quiet at the end of each iteration) is something amazing to behold.

I guess what I like most about this collection is that it gives me a chance to hear the band evolve over the course of roughly half an hour from tolerably average to a band on the cusp of greatness. The fact that these tracks are only available as bonuses to (on the whole) mediocre albums is a bit obnoxious, but if you like 60's Kinks, you simply must collect these tracks in any way you can.

1. The band is way, way better on here than on the first two proper Kinks albums. There isn't a single obvious stinker as far as my ears can hear, as Davies has finally figured out how to consistently write decent early 60's guitar-pop. Heck, even the sole cover, the opening Dave-sung "Milk Cow Blues," is given a rendition that's miles above the covers that had littered the last two albums (I don't know if the Stones ever covered this, but I'm betting that The Kinks' version would at least match, if not exceed a version by them). Add in that Ray is no longer using "You Really Got Me" as a major crutch, and you have a pretty impressive achievement.

2. If the band had continued along this vein, they were simply not going to get any better. Their stuff might have been starter-quality at the AAA level by this point, but as major-leaguers they were going to be middle relievers at best. The whole album exudes competence, but distressingly little of it goes beyond that point. The sole classic (later covered by Van Halen to great effect) is "Where Have All the Good Times Gone," a great ode to getting stressed out by life and longing for a more relaxing time, even while acknowledging that, "things are so much easier today." It does a great job of contrasting a sing-songey chorus with an aggressive Dylanish vocal in the verses, and shows some real creative oomph that's mostly lacking on the rest of the album.

Indeed, aside from "Till the End of the Day," the closest thing to a "Got Me" clone on the album (though it's much different in vibe, replacing the "I want you babe" feel of "Got Me" with "Think happy thoughts think happy thoughts" as if he was in that one Twilight Zone episode with the kid who could read minds), and the mildly pretty ballad "Ring the Bells," the whole album falls into the "decent but disposable" category. These songs just reek of anachronism, and not just today; it's amazing to realize these were released at a time when Dylan had put out Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and when the Beatles were just about to release Rubber Soul. Something like "When I See That Girl of Mine," nice as it may be, wouldn't have come close to deserving inclusion on any Beatles album after Please Please Me, and given that Ray was somebody who would be writing "Rainy Day in June" and "Sunny Afternoon" as soon as the next album, this is impossible to ignore. The songs almost all have moderate hooks, and are basically enjoyable when on, but they fail to make any permanent dent in my consciousness once they're done (in contrast, turn back to "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Sitting on My Sofa," which are bonus tracks here).

In the end, an 8 is really the only possible grade for this album. It is good, no question about it ... but it only aspires to greatness a couple of times, and that can't be ignored. Thankfully, though, greatness was just around the corner...

Allegedly, Ray had a bit of a nervous breakdown early in the sessions of recording this album, fueled by a realization that he was getting older and becoming an industry pawn and being forced to write music that wasn't 100% what he had his heart in, and it seems that coming out of it armed him with a giant "Screw It All" attitude that allowed him to change his musical and especially lyrical approaches drastically. Looking past the opening sound effect of a telephone ringing and a Brit answering, the opening "Party Line" might be considered just another in the line of Dave-sung up-tempo openers, but the lyrics are already 100% classic Kinks. "Is she big? Is she small? Is she a she at all?" and "I'm not voting in the next election unless somebody does something about finding out the person who is on my party line" are bits of goofy cleverness that no other songwriter would ever (at that time) have had the ability to write. "Rosy Won't You Please Come Home?" is another example of a "normal" song that sounds way different from anything else of the time, both because of the heavy dose of harpsichord (a year earlier Ray would have just used standard instrumentation) and because he addresses the topic of a runaway child not from the typical angle of the rebellious child but instead from the angle of the parents who miss their kid and who will, if she comes home, "bake a cake if (she likes) it." And then we have "Dandy," a two-minute portrait of a swinging bachelor that contains my favorite Kinks lyric of all time ("And when you're old and gray you will remember what's been said, that two girls are too many, three's a crowd and four you're dead"). It also shows Ray effectively doing an acoustic guitar-popper that's more Rubber Soul than Please Please Me, and MAN that's good to hear from him.

"Too Much on My Mind" strikes me as a slight step down, but not as much as I originally thought it was; the verse melody is a little weak, but the sweet chorus (with more effective harpsichord) mostly makes up for it. "Session Man" is a cute pop song with an excuse to have a solo harpsichord introduction (the chorus is a little dippy - "He's a session man, a chord prog-ress-i-on, a top mu-sic-i-an" - but that's part of its charm), and then we have the first major highlight of the album, "Rainy Day in June." What's most interesting to me about this song is the way Ray almost manages to sound like a pretentious art-rocker or fantasy-metaller lyrically (this is a song that mentions misty shadows and eagles spreading their mighty wings, demons stretching crinkled hands and snatching a butterfly, and elves and gnomes hunched in fear), but he uses these images very carefully, making sure the listener mainly remembers it was a rainy day, and everybody felt the rain. As a dark, apocalyptic pop song, this is remarkable because of the fact that, unlike Morrison and Co. a year later (and I like The Doors, bear in mind), the potentially goofy "gothic" aspects are only used as window dressing, and not as anything like the main attraction (which definitely consists of the melody, the chorus and the *BOOM* of the thunder).

The album is a little spotty from here on out, but it's still fine overall. The best of the lot is "Sunny Afternoon," a song that's so awesomely square it's a rectangle. It combines amazing lyrics about a rich guy who's lost everything except his mansion to taxes and other sundry sources, a melody that reworks traditional music hall values in a way that nobody else was even considering at the time, and a playful vocal delivery (with GREAT backing harmonies in the chorus) that argues the case of Ray Davies As Genius as well as anything else in the band's catalogue. Unfortunately, none of the rest of the album comes close to hitting this peak, nor does it quite live up to the initial stretch thru "Rainy Day in June." "Fancy" is a particular low point, with nothing I can recommend musically; the melody is unmemorable and kinda ugly, and the way Ray's vocals mix with the acoustic guitars and the bass just strikes me as an awkward attempt at something vaguely pyschedelic. The rest ranges from fairly standard 'primitive' rockers ("Holiday in Waikiki" is the best, with energetic drumming and an amusing travelogue for lyrics, while "House in the Country" and the Dave-sung "You're Looking Fine" are at least moderately catchy and provide good balance to the album, even if I don't love them) to more attempts to smoosh Ray's new approach in with standard Brit-pop-rock ("Most Exclusive Residence for Sale"; the closing "I'll Remember," which would have stood out a lot earlier in the album but gets kinda dwarved by "Sunny Afternoon," which proceeds it), and finally to an acoustic character sketch that has nice lyrics and an ok set of vocal melodies and chord sequences ("Little Miss Queen of Darkness"). No, they're not amazing, and they certainly let the album down a bit overall (it's a very, very good thing that "Sunny Afternoon" shows up when it does to leave a good taste in my mouth at the end), but they're still good on the whole.

Overall, then, this is a fine debut of the "classic" Kinks sound, and while they'd certainly improve on it in the future, this album is a necessity for any Kinks collection and for any decent overall collection. This is especially true given the AMAZING quality of the bonus tracks on the reissue, which I will be mostly ignoring (and not counting in the overall rating) on the grounds that I will cover them in my Kink Kronikles review later. A couple of them aren't found on that collection, however, and one of them, the Dave-sung "Mr. Reporter" (with amazingly biting lines like, "Do you like what you're doing or is it that you can do nothing else?" and "I'll believe all that you put down. I'll believe the sun is going up, even though it's going down.") is a minor classic (the other, the "Little Women," is a nice two-minute instrumental that makes use of a lot of mellotron flutes in the first half and standard mellotron sounds in the last twenty seconds). Anyway, seek out this album, and especially seek out the reissue.

While I find Ray's lyrics intriguing, though, he doesn't reach deep down into my soul in such a way that that's enough for immortality. I don't quite reach the Starostin level of giving this a shockingly low grade (7/10), but I can sure empathize with his perspective. For way too many listens, this seemed to me like three monstrous tracks and a whole bunch of relative filler, and while that notion's mostly dissipated, I'm still not sold on this whole album. It also doesn't help that, while the album is actually pretty diverse, it manages to slam nearly all of the genres it takes on into the same twee Brit-pop mold, which is nice but a little hard for me to endure. The album cover shown above may be a nice powder blue, but my version of the album is a solid grey, and the album has that same monotonous feel to my ears even when I academically know that Ray and co. are taking on several styles.

Still, monotony or no, this album is very nice. There are still some tracks I don't like; for instance, except for the cool "Kiss me with one ray of light from your lazy old sun" lyric, I find "Lazy Old Sun" close to an unlistenable mess (like with "Fancy," I just can't buy this band trying to do any sort of psychedelia). "No Return" doesn't sound painful to me, but it does sound like two minutes of rambling nothing, and Dave's tune of longing, "Funny Face," has a lot of elements that sound ok on their own but that don't really come together in a way I'd like. Oh, and "Situation Vacant" is a fun tale of a man's life getting ruined by his nagging mother-in-law, but aside from the chorus it's not very impressive. On the plus side, "Harry Rag" and "Tin Soldier Man" are fun forays into the world of British folk music and playful war marches; "Two Sisters" and especially "Afternoon Tea" are wuss-pop of a high level; and "End of the Season" is an atmospheric bliss that conveys the transition from summer to autumn fantastically. Oh, and let's not forget my favorite of the 'lesser' tracks, the Dave-sung "Love Me Till The Sun Shines," a high-quality pop-rocker (which, for some reason that totally escapes me, George Starostin referred to as a "weak ballad," which is odd given that it's neither weak nor a ballad) that adds a badly needed dose of up-tempo bliss to the middle of the album.

These all pale, of course, to the big three. The opening "David Watts" is twee Brit-pop par excellence; it may technically be a ripoff of "Let's Spend the Night Together" by the Stones, but ehn, the Stones were sorta ripping off The Kinks in the first place when they made that (excellent) album, so I'm not going to hold that against a song that's as cool a portrait of lower class yearning as this. The second song, the immortal "Death of a Clown," is probably the best Dave-song in the band's catalogue, as it captures the timeless power and depth of the most profound moment in the history of television (I refer to, of course, the Chuckles the Clown episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show) with a glorious melody and high-pitched harmonies that I could only imagine before hearing this. The best song of all, though, comes at the end in "Waterloo Sunset," about a man who gains joy not from living his own life but from watching other people live theirs, and with another amazing melody to boot. I don't agree with the multitudes who would crown this as the band's best song (it wouldn't make my top 5), but it's amazing, right down to the twangy guitar tone that plays the melody in the beginning and the end.

When all is said and done, I definitely don't agree with those who elevate this album to a plateau of immortality, but it's a great album nonetheless and one of the band's best, and a necessity for any collection. Just try to fight the initial urge to get bored and you'll be fine.

You know what, though? I'm not 100% sold on this album. This album starts off absolutely amazingly, but even if there's not a single bad song on here, this album still seriously runs out of gas by the end. Not only does this album stack the GREAT songs in the first half, leaving slimmer pickings for the rest, it even loses steam conceptually. This is a loose concept album about nostalgia, both for one's personal memories and for an olden-time idealized England (a time of village greens and steam-powered trains and innocence and whatnot), but past a certain point, the only continuations of this concept are topical rehashes of (superior, unfortunately) songs that had already come. And, well, the general monotony of the sound wears me down after a while. Dang it, people, diversity does matter. No, diversity alone can't make a weak album into a great one, and it can't make a great album into just a good album, but lack of diversity can take a potential all-time classic and nudge it ever so slightly out of the realm of ironclad immortality. I mean, I love the songs on this album as a whole, but this is (in the end) a much harder album for me to listen to than I'd want from an album that a decent number of people list as one of the 25 greatest of all time.

It can't be ignored, though, that the high points are jaw-dropping. The title track, aside from functioning as the album's "mission statement" (preservation of all sorts of elements of the "good old days"), has one of the smoothest flowing pop melodies I've ever heard, making it one of the two or three greatest songs ever written by a guy who wrote more than a few great ones. The band's ties to mainstream coolness are completely severed in this song (if there were any ties left), what with the lyrics and the lack of guitar and the dominance of organ (oddly enough, though, the loudest instrumentation in the song comes from the drums), but those of us who aren't cavemen can love this for what it is (and don't forget those cute faux-Beach Boys backing harmonies!): a close-to-perfect pop song. The followup, "Do You Remember Walter?," is a wonderful musing of what happens when old friends grow old and boring, even as your memories keep them the same age forever. That it also has a pair of fantastic, perfectly complementary melodies is enough to make the song into a rock-solid classic.

"Picture Book," then, is another example of Ray's ability to take the dorkiest, hokiest ideas and do them so shamelessly and skillfully that they become totally enjoyable. Forget that the lyrics (about taking pictures to preserve the present for the future) are clever and the melody is impeccable; it also has parts like "naaaah nah nah nah" and Ray giving up singing "normal" lines at times and resorting to, "uh scooby dooby doo." Normally, with most songwriters, I'd be reaming the writer for so clearly running out of ideas and releasing a work-in-progress as a finished song; in this case, I can just tip my hat to the way he makes the song so enticing from start to finish. Next up is "Johnny Thunder," a song whose lyrical point eludes me (mostly because I can't figure out what "Johnny Thunder lives on water, feeds on lightning" means), but whose melody and especially whose chorus (those are some weirdly powerful "baaaa ba ba ba ba ba baa" backing vocals) are enough to make it a minor lightweight classic.

"The Last of the Steam Powered Trains" is an interesting take on gritty, "rootsy" blues-rock, with Ray matching this ode to old-fashioned trains with a backing track that really does remind me of a train slowly rumbling down the tracks (until the part near the end where they speed things up and, for one glorious moment, the memory of the train going full speed is brought back to life). It's also the end of the album's stretch of impeccability; the tracks from here on out are all good, but almost all of them feel "supplemental," if you get me. My favorite of this group is "Animal Farm," an incredible (both lyrically and musically) ode to farm life, and both "Village Green" and the closing "People Take Pictures of Each Other" (topical rehashing notwithstanding) are outstanding examples of the band's prime style. Looking at the rest of the tracks, though, my general reaction is "nice, but kinda quaint." "Sitting by the Riverside" has a nice French cafe feel to it, "Big Sky" is at least a better nod towards psychedelia than "Lazy Old Sun" was, and "Phenomenal Cat" is quiet softness done well, but the other tracks don't exactly awe me. They're nice and all, but aside from the already-mentioned "Wicked Annabella" (about a forest witch, I guess), I don't really consider them worthy of namechecking.

So as you can see, an E or F is out of the question for this album as far as I'm concerned. I dig the style, but I don't dig it that much, and as great as a lot of the songs on here are, the great songs only make up about half of the album. Still, half great and half good is worth a very very high grade, and it deserves a place in any respectable rock and pop collection.

Arthur, as can probably be deduced from the full title, is another concept album (the band wouldn't make another non-conceptual album for almost another decade), but it's much more developed and fleshed-out than the loose conceptuality of Village Green. Basically, it creates a parallel between the British Empire, which started out grand and all-powerful and finished as rather unremarkable, and a Brit named Arthur, who started off totally average (but with dreams of grandeur) and ... finished as rather unremarkable. The first side is Arthur as a young man (and the empire still in its prime), and the second side is Arthur as an older man who's lost the ability to advance particularly far in life (and the empire as a deflated spectre of its former self, one that would only continue to go down hill). If ever there was really such a thing as "The British Dream," this album is about how that dream dissolved around and for the poor schmos like Arthur who grew up eagerly awaiting their piece of it, only to see it completely unrealized. This may seem fairly unremarkable, but let's face it; most concept albums either involve totally fantastical, otherworldly stories that have no direct bearing on everyday life, or bizarre, interesting things happening to people and changing them in a spiritual way. Arthur is one of the few albums to fess up to the notion that most people, frankly, are boring losers that let life happen to them instead of going out and living it, and that far too often the act of letting life happen to them means that pretty much nothing happens to them. It's disarming and unsettling, but it's something badly needed in rock music.

The opening "Victoria" takes us back to the glory days of the British Empire, when "sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean," and when the best thing one could do with one's life was to go out for a few years and fight for queen and country. It has some slower parts with stately horns, betraying that it's definitely late 60's Kinks that we're listening to, but it also starts off with and stays heavy on up-tempo guitar parts, complete with with Dave's charmingly out-of-practice attempt at a fast guitar solo, signifying from the start the band's recommitment to something resembling actual rock music. I still don't get the weird singing voice (though Ray's normal voice returns during the slow, "Land of hope and glory-a, land of my Victoria" part), but it's a classic. Then it's off to war with "Yes Sir, No Sir," which smooshes a bunch of regal, militaristic themes into a rather goofy number about life as a mindless grunt (and immediately showing that the romantic thoughts of how wonderful it is to serve queen and country, alluded to in the opener, are a bunch of hooey).

Continuing in the theme of war, we come to one of the finest ballads Ray ever wrote, and an easy choice for one of my five favorites from the band. "Some Mother's Son" further bursts the bubble of the nobility of being a soldier by reminding the listener of the actual humanity of casualties of war (and of the humanity of the mothers of those soldiers), something that warmongers seem overeager to ignore. It's particularly poignant for pointing out that every soldier on the battlefield was, at some point, a carefree child playing games underneath the sun; that a soldier in this song gets killed as a direct result of momentarily tapping those innocent memories is just another good example of what a sordid state of affairs war is. Whatever may be, the song is utterly stunning.

Moving back to happier times in life, we come to "Drivin'," which is Ray's nod to the fun of enjoying life by wasting it in idle pursuits, even as rough things are happening all around in both your personal life and in the world at large. The melody's fun, and the harmonies are cute. "Brainwashed," then, is Ray addressing both Arthur and the world at large, denouncing the way people way allow themselves to be subservient to 'the powers that be;' content with just a few things in life, just because they're too tired to fight back. More importantly, though, it's a song that would have sounded AWESOME had it been on the Clash debut album almost a decade later; that one moment where Dave taps into a brutally heavy guitar sound, bringing out all his (inevitable) frustration with having to restrict his pure rock instincts for so many years, is just breathtaking, and the way Ray's vocal melody plays around that sound (which is then mirrored by trumpets the next time it would have a chance to come back) in a way that merges perfectly with the rest of the song makes this a total classic.

After the amusing-but-overlong 'advertisement' of "Australia," which mimics the way Britain tried to make Australia seem the way western America was in the 1800's (the song is neat, but the jamming is just awkward, even if the excess of it ends up making it oddly alluring in the end), we come to the second half, where the cold reality of Arthur's life is hitting home. "Shangri-La" is my favorite Kinks song, and while it's the music that really brings things home for me, the lyrics hit me right in the places where I'm sure Ray was aiming. After slogging through the uptight British school system, after suffering through military service, after getting an 'honest' 'working-class' job, after generally being a good boy and doing all that he was told to do, his reward is ... sitting by the fire in a house that looks like everybody else's. And a mortgage he can't really afford. And a couple of small niceties, like a TV and a radio, that he has to finance. And zombie-like neighbors who all have the exact same lives he does. Sheesh, when Ray puts it like this, I can see why he really didn't want to get a job like everybody else. But forget the lyrics for as second; the music is INCREDIBLE, starting from the dark acoustic main theme, moving into a sad-but-less-depressing harpsichord-driven melody (that gets reprised at the end), momentarily climaxing with each chant of "Shangri-laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," and then breaking into a bitchin' acoustic-theme that's propelled by Mick Avory's greatest stretch on drums. It's simply glorious, and its five-plus minutes feel like three.

The rest of the side can't hope to match this song, but it puts on a good show anyway. "Mr. Churchill Says" starts off kinda stupid for a couple of minutes (with Ray bringing out the voice from "Victoria," which I guess is supposed to be a symbol of big government or jingoism or something similarly stupid in his eyes), but when the sirens start going off, an electric guitar theme pops up that rocks harder (in its distinctly 60's way) than anything the band had done (outside of "Brainwashed," obviously) since Kinkssize/Kinkdom. "She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina" is a fun music-hall romp about people coping with their pathetic lives by buying things they can't afford, and strangely contains my favorite stanza on the album ("He's bought a hat like Anthony Eden's because it makes him feel like a Lord. But he can't afford a Rolls or a Bentley; he has to buy a secondhand Ford."). After the aforementioned "Young and Innocent Days," we come to later in Arthur's life ("Nothing to Say"), when his kids grow up and he no longer gets to have them around regularly to ease the relative pointlesses of his existence. I would point out, by the way, that if you look at this track in the "Decline and Fall of the British Empire" light, this track also works as Britain's various colonies and protectorates breaking off and starting their own lives (I guess keeping the queen on their money is the equivalent of phoning on Father's Day and Christmas).

Finally, we come to the title track, where Ray tries to make sense of what's happened with Arthur's life (through a wonderfully bouncy, anthemic tune). The key line of the whole thing, I think, is when Ray says, "And your hope and glory has passed you by; can't you see what the world is doing to ya'?" which largely absolves Arthur directly and puts the blame instead on Britain failing the little people even as it was failing itself in the world. For all of its criticism of Arthur for being a mindless sheep elsewhere in his life, the song is kind enough to suggest that, "Arthur, could be you were right all along"; even with the choices he made, he did not have to end up in the state he did, and would not have if Britain had held up its end of the contract it implicitly made with Arthur when he was busily being indoctrinated. Ray doesn't despise Arthur; he instead (kinda condescendingly) pities him, and loves him and wants to help him through. Don't ya know it, don't ya know it.

I love this album, and my sincerest recommendation, if you're not familiar with the Kinks, is to make this and Village Green simultaneous purchases the next time that's feasible. Ray's conceptuality wasn't always very effective, and would largely be his downfall in later years, but on the last album and (especially) this album he was able to make a pair of gems. They show two rather different sides of the band, and while I slightly prefer this one (at least, in this case), both should be enjoyed regularly.

It's tempting to say that Ray was focusing more on the lyrics and concept than on the music when making this album; the problem with this is that the lyrics and concept aren't that impressive either. The general idea of the album is that a group of musicians start out as a struggling band, write a #1 single (Capn' Marvel theorized that "Lola" itself is the big #1 single of the fictional band, and I have to say that that makes a lot of sense), make it big and come face to face with the soulless machinery that is the music industry (in the end realizing that it's not the money and fame that matter, but rather the people and places they care about). I'm not sure that this was a topic that was routinely broached by musicians way back in 1971, but it's hard not to look at it as awfully cliche, especially when the execution of the topic makes it feel at times like a half-baked musician bio-pic ("Ray, I gotta tell you, we think you're onto something very big here. Nobody's ever combined transexuality and big major chord changes before! Lola is a smash. You better start thinking about a follow-up, my friend. Right now!"). The tracks on Arthur still had a heavy dose of cleverness in their character sketches, but there's an awful lot of banality leaking out of this album.

For all these weaknesses, though, there are some very good songs on here. "Lola," of course, was the band's first big Big BIG single since "You Really Got Me," and it's a well-deserved classic and easily the best on the album. On the first side, the other (minor) highlights are "Strangers" (a largely acoustic ballad marking the return of Dave Davies, with some effectively haggard vocals that make the simplistic lyrics work better than they could otherwise) and "Get Back in Line" (a nice ode to working class angst in the "pre-hit" portion of the album, which gets draggy in places but has some lovely moments). On the second side, I'm very fond of the catchy return-to-vaudeville jaunt of "The Moneygoround"; it's shorter than it reasonably could have been, but what's here is a lot of fun. The last three tracks of the album are even better; "Apeman" is a catchy-as-hell longing for a "primitive" life (while also acknowledging that, for all of the technology around us, we're really not as sophisticated as we think we are), "Powerman" is a driving guitar-fest about a big powerful music executive (my favorite music on the album aside from "Lola" is the 'chorus' melody of "It's same old story, it's the same old dream, it's power man, power man, and all that it can bring.") and "Got to be Free" is a fun song with pianos and banjo where (I guess) the protagonist breaks out of the shackles of the industry and finds happiness in his original life. Frankly, I have no emotional investiture in the concept of the album (especially by the end), so it's nice that I'm able to enjoy this as much as I do for 'pure' musical reasons.

The other tracks aren't bad, they're just kinda bland and unexciting to my ears. The one track that serves as a frightening harbinger of what was to come later is "Top of the Pops"; not only is this track a clear case of Ray writing lyrics first and then coming up with a melody for them second, it also features a main riff that sounds an awful lot like a simple variant of Louie Louie, as well as a second riff that's basically the melody to Land of a Thousand Dances with one note changed. Otherwise, though, there are a lot of songs (both in the 'rocker' and 'ballad' areas) that sound moderately ok when on and leave absolutely no lasting impression with me once they're done. If you hang on every word and note that Ray and Dave can offer (Dave has a second contribution in the distorted-guitar laden Rats, and it has an ok riff but not much else), I can kinda understand; as is, with the Kinks having come into my music education pretty late, I don't care enough to give these tracks yet another listen to try and dig something out of them.

It's rather disappointing to me that Ray could crash so much within the course of a year; if this album didn't have Lola on it, the grade would be noticably lower. There are fine songs here, yes, but they're coming in about 50/50 with the ok-or-worse ones, and that's not something I can really ignore. If you're starting up a Kinks collection, this should not be near the beginning; if you have to have Lola on an album right away, get The Kink Kronikles.

The opening "God's Children" (which made Kink Kronikles and is usually considered the album's best track) is decent, but while Ray may completely be earnest about the point he's trying to make lyrically in the song, he doesn't do a great job of making me care thanks to the relatively low ratio of substance to attempted anthemic power. Still, the substance is there somewhat, and I feel at least a small twinge when listening to it. A few tracks later comes what I consider the real highlight of the album, the nice organ-laced ballad "Moments." If nothing else, the part where Ray sings, "Don't you cry, don't you cry, don't you cry" is the strongest hook of the album, and this in conjunction with the slight Dylanish growl (for lack of a better word) in Ray's vocals is enough to give this song the nod. Oh, and the last full song of the album, "Willesden Green," is notable for Ray handing over vocals to bassist John Dalton (who takes on a very Elvis-like tone in his voice), so even if the lyrical message is largely the same as on "Village Green," I'm able to forgive it due to the novelty.

But the rest, ehn. The only real standout is "Animals in the Zoo," and that's mostly because I can't help but focus on how much it sounds like an alternate version of "Apeman" (I know, it's a different melody and has different lyrics, but it has the same feel as "Apeman"). Everything else works as background music but nothing more, and that's way below the standard I hold the Kinks to. In short, there's a good reason that (last I checked) this still hadn't officially been issued in the US, and even a serious Kinks fan shouldn't pay full price for this. Heck, I'm probably overrating it.

It really amazes how the band apparently didn't learn its lesson over the first three albums and continued to leave so many great songs off of its albums (especially since Face to Face and Something Else each had some obvious dross as candidates for replacement). Had the four weakest tracks on F2F been replaced by the four representatives here of that album's bonus tracks (a fifth representative from those sessions, "She's Got Everything," wasn't among the bonus tracks, and it's just as well seeing as it's not that great), for instance, that album would have been an easy E and probably would have knocked Arthur from its perch as my favorite Kinks album. "Dead End Street" is an amazing look at the hopelessness of life as a poor person with no prospects for improvement, with well-placed "Dead end!" chants in the chorus and a great melody that brings out simple-yet-effective lines like, "What are we living for? Two-roomed apartment on the second floor. No chance to emigrate, I'm deep in debt and now it's much too late." "This is Where I Belong" is the finest rebuttal (musically and otherwise) I can imagine to the rock cliche of "we gotta get out of this place"; the line, "I won't search for a house upon a hill. Why should I when I'd only miss you still, for this is where I belong ..." has more meaning to me than the entire dribble of the worst 70's RCA albums. And the other two, holy hell. "Big Black Smoke" (the B-side to "Dead End Street") is one of the best combinations of catchiness and darkness in the band's whole catalogue (about a girl who grew tired of her life and ran off with somebody who ended up setting her house on fire with her and her child in it), and "Mr. Pleasant" (the A-side to "This is Where I Belong") takes Ray's music-hall obsession (much more potent here than on "Sunny Afternoon," even if that is the better song over all) to an unprecedented level of goofy magnificence. I am quite sure that nobody else in the world could have written "Mr. Pleasant"; nobody else would be willing to say "to hell with dignity" quite to the extreme that was required to write and record this song.

The Something Else tracks aren't as amazing as that quartet (except for "Autumn Almanac," a catchy-as-hell multi-part song about living in one place forever and enjoying its monotony enough to not really want to leave), but they're ok. The Dave-sung "Susannah's Still Alive" can't hold a candle to his best SE contributions (and doesn't even have any moments on par with the best ones in "Funny Face"), but "Wonderboy" and "Polly" are character sketches that are at least on the same level as the average material of the main album. Of the three Village Green tracks, one is a slight duffer ("Did You See His Name?"), but I would have been perfectly happy seeing the mellotron-laden "Berkeley Mews" knock off "Monica" or the acoustic-driven "Days" knock off "Starstruck." And finally, there's the two Arthur-era tracks, which of course wouldn't have fit in well on that album (where the conceptuality was very tight), but are both very good nonetheless. "King Kong" gives a good rocking punch to its lyrics about how great it is to be a societal bully, and the Dave-penned "Mindless Child of Motherhood" is a fine bit of social (I guess; if it's a song to a woman who scorned him, then it's a bizarre one) critique.

And that's it; as an outtakes collection, this album would rate at least a B, and when combined with the already-known tracks that make up the remainder, a boost to D seems pretty automatic. The only reason I don't give it a higher grade is that I'm wary of giving grades higher than D to compilations; the Past Masters comps and Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy are special cases because those are specifically singles compilations, whereas this is just a very high quality period retrospective. Whatever the rating, though, it's absolutely essential.

The major classic, of course, is the opening "20th Century Man," where Ray expresses his life philosophy more effectively in one line ("I'm a 20th century man, but I don't want to be here") than he would in his hours of obsessive rants on the subject over the next 20 years. The lyrics are hilariously paranoid and Libertarian (see: "I was born in a welfare state, ruled by bureaucracy, controlled by civil servants and people dressed in grey. Got no privacy, got no liberty, 'cos the 20th century people took it all away from me"), but they manage to entertain instead of annoy in this case, and they work very well with the music itself. The song starts off with kind of a Band-ish country flavor to it and builds into a strong organ-and-guitar rocker, and Ray mixes up his vocal delivery well, ranging from a kinda proto-Knoplfer low-pitch grumble to his classic screaming style by the end. It's arguably the best song of the post-Kronikles era, and it's definitely the best song-length crescendo in the band's catalogue.

None of the rest of the album rocks quite as hard as the opener does in its most intense moments, but that doesn't make it much less enjoyable. "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues" would be a throwaway with any other set of lyrics; as is, the fact that Ray decided to put this kind of paranoid rant to this kind of New Orleans-y music makes it a minor classic. "Holiday" features Ray singing with a cigar in his mouth to make the song seem more 'authentic' as a 20's number, "Alcohol" is a dark cross between generic 20's jazz and some rather interesting 'mystical' folk (I guess; I'm sure there's a better description for it, I just can't think of one), and "Complicated Life" is such a fun singalong that I can completely forgive the total genericism of its Dixieland melody. All of these songs could be dismissed, but they each have something extremely interesting going for them, and that's good enough for me.

Most of the rest of the songs are at least slightly more removed from the "hick" nature of the others, and should satisfy even fans with an allergy to such styles of music. My favorites are "Skin and Bone" (about a woman who went from fat to way way too thin), "Have A Cuppa Tea" (a weird cross between 'normal' Kinks Britishness and gospel that makes Tea close to divine) and the title track (a fun anthem where Ray happily declares his status as a British hick), but the others are all at least ok (except for "Uncle Son," which kinda passes me by every time). In particular, "Here Come the People in Grey" is a fun and disturbing generic rocker that delves into Ray's fears that The Bureaucracy Is Coming To Get Him, and "Holloway Jail" is at least notable for Ray's voice sounding (to my ears, anyway) more than a bit like Neil Young's in places. Not a great track, but certainly a decent one.

There's a couple of other tracks I didn't mention, and they're not bad either (I just couldn't think of anything to say about them). The main overall point that I want to get across is that, while not bursting with obvious classics, this album has a style and feel to it that's as interesting as almost anything else in the band's catalogue, and that alone is enough to make this a very worthwhile listen. It's not an all-time classic by any means, but it's definitely in the band's top 5, and that means it's great. If you have to get into 70's Kinks, start here.

A couple of the songs follow the MH formula a bit too closely, and they're not so great. "Maximum Consumption" is basically the exact same melody as "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoid Blues" and has the same lyrical theme as "Skin and Bones" (centered on Ray instead of a girl named Annie), and "Look a Little On the Sunny Side" is sooooo over-the-top simplistic and hokey that it just doesn't really work. "Unreal Reality" also follows the formula kinda closely, except for a big-band intro and outro that sounds awfully awkward, and the song doesn't impress me much either. A couple of the songs that could have been from the MH sessions are a lot of fun, though: "Motorway" does "leisurely folk-pop made really hyper" very well, and "Hot Potato" is a delightful romp featuring Dave proclaiming his passionate love for ... potatoes.

The other five songs, except for the totally throwaway Dave-song "You Don't Know My Name," are just fine, and more than enough to ensure this album a 9. The opening "Here Comes a New Day" dwells on road fatigue, and Ray is smart enough to set the lyrics to a peppy horn-laced guitar-pop song; it really gives the impression of the artist being mentally fatigued, but totally laced on caffeine (or more illicit substances) and able to face the day because of it. "Sitting in my Hotel" is a lovely musing of whether or not living the life of a rock star is really worth it; I find it most interesting for the way it focuses on his lifestyle would look to his friends, who would look at the shallow extravagance of it all and laugh and, "would all be saying that it's not really me ... would all be asking who I'm trying to be." Melody-wise, it's probably the prettiest ballad Ray had written since Arthur, and that says something.

"Supersonic Rocket Ship" is a playful diversion that shows the nice sense of humor that Ray would completely lose in the next few albums, with nice light touches of what almost sounds like a ukelele and a fun melody with lyrics about how wonderful life on the ship would be. On the other side of the spectrum is the big epic of the album, the closing "Celluloid Heroes," which was clearly written with the intent of being the best of this collection of songs and which actually lives up to this attempt. It's a musing on the immortality of movie stars and other notables via the inscriptions of their name in the sidewalk of Hollywood Blvd., and somehow it works as a march through the history of cinema and all the ups and downs of everybody who had struggled for fame. For all the pomposity of the lyrics (and they are pompous; come on, Ray is taking it upon himself to write THE big treatise on what it means to be a musician or thespian seeking fame and glory), the melody really manages to carry things impeccably; it's freaking beautiful, and frames the lyrics perfectly.

So that's the studio half. This album was actually a double (now on one CD), and the live album that makes up the other half is ... interesting, if a little unnecessary. Aside from a couple of odd choices of older material (boo to "Top of the Pops," yay to "Brainwashed"), it consists of runthroughs of Muswell Hillbillies tracks and Ray messing with the audience by singing 45 seconds of "Mr. Wonderful," a minute and a half of "The Banana Boat Song" and two minutes of "Baby Face" (the last track is just the audience singing the coda to "Lola" for two minutes). It's interesting if nothing else for the way it shows that Ray had a bit of a Dylanish way of messing with his audiences at this point; I mean, I doubt that the average person coming to the performances captured on this album had this much interest in hearing MH material, but here it is. Ah well; it's also interesting to hear Ray's bizarre interactions with the audience, and to hear the Big Band version of the group live.

So there's the album; not great, but certainly quite good, and a decent close to the first half or so of the band's career. Believe me, things were about to go really bad.

I bring this up not because it has anything directly to do with the subject matter of this album, but because this is the only rational explanation for what happened to Ray in the leadup to this album. Ray Davies, as we have grown to know him, is not the Ray Davies who shows up on this album and its successor; oh sure, the obsession with simple life and village greens and fear of progress that is largely the foundation of this is nothing new, but never before, not even in the very earliest days of the group (which at the least beat the snot out of this in the fun department) had Ray sounded this unremittingly incompetent. Maybe this album shouldn't be rated lower than the debut on an 'objective' basis, but screwups on this level deserve extra ire.

Some background: Ray had originally hoped to release a full-version of Preservation all at once, but apparently pressure was put on him to release an album well before he was going to be finished (or before he even had a plot mapped out), so he had little choice but to put this out as a stopgap. Now, when you're looking to make a rock opera, there are three critical elements: music, lyrics and plot. In order to be successful, you need to do well on at least two out of the three; Preservation, on the other hand, fails in all three. There is no plot here; Ray decided to instead treat this as a series of character introductions, but where Ray had previously succeeded so marvelously in coming up with character sketch tracks, here he comes up with nothing interesting to say about anything or anybody related to this world of his. This of course brings us to the lyrics, which tend to feature Ray presenting "ambiguous" lines to give listeners something to puzzle over (for instance, he resurrects the persona of Johnny Thunder) even though he himself didn't know where the hell he was going with his story. The rest of the time they're just bland and irritating.

And the music? Do you really think Ray would bother to take care of writing good music for this? Of course not, he was too busy focusing on the lyrics and the story! Which also sucked! The only moment on the album that even remotely rocks is the opening (on CD; it wasn't part of the original album, but was a lead single of sorts) "Preservation," and that's only because Ray steals a guitar line from "Purple Haze" so blatantly that it drives me nuts. The only tune that's reasonably pretty is "Sitting in the Mid-day Sun," and that's only because he decided to so blatantly steal from "Sunny Afternoon." Yeah, I know that thievery is something that's unavoidable in writing rock and pop music, but when you steal from your betters (including yourself at a better time) you have to make at least some sort of effort to distract from the theft. If you don't, you severely decrease the chances of the listener going, "boy, that's a neat twist on a familiar idea" and increase the chances of them going, "Gah! Why did he steal the line to 'Purple Haze??!!'"

The rest of the album is not pretty and does not rock. Sure, it doesn't regularly jump out of its way to be ugly or ear-splitting, but I almost wish it would; it would alleviate the loooong stretches of boredom. There are problems afoot when a pure musical-style song about Cricket is arguably the best of a bunch of tracks; the rest has no good riffs and no pretty melodies, simple as that. If you can enjoy Kinks music without these two elements, then you'll swallow anything that Ray Davies puts to tape; as for me, I only have love for Ray's creations when he meets my requirements. When he doesn't, screw him.

And lo, Act 2 was on the horizon ...

I have to admit, though, that this album starts and ends rather strong (which is definitely more than I could say for Act 1). "Introduction to Solution" and "When a Solution Comes" are both very different from anything the band had done before, and they're awfully good for it. They're both rather dark and have their own goofy kind of anthemic power, giving the songs the kind of apocalyptic flair that would be suitable for a better album of this ilk. "When a Solution Comes" is especially enjoyable, as it shows Ray going for a gloomy Roxy Music-style (especially in the second half) kind of decadent atmosphere that builds off the opening downbeat guitar lines very well. The closing "Salvation Road," which is the anthem of the people's army and which becomes the national anthem after Black takes over, is a high quality semi-grandiose up-tempo acoustic number that (I guess) works in a way like "We're Not Gonna Take It" did on Tommy. If nothing else, these songs reveal that Ray's talent wasn't completely gone overnight.

The rest, though .. ugh. Ok, there are a couple of songs that kinda work (the cheese-fest "Mirror of Love" is a nice bit of jazzy balladry, and "Money Talks" is a fun bit of dorky rock), but they only work on a guilty pleasure level, and the rest loses the "pleasure" part completely. I just cannot find these songs enjoyable; they're not hideous, but they're full of the same ever-present stench of boredom that sank Act 1. There's not enough solid material here to fill a single album, let alone a double, and thus it's impossible to give this a much higher grade than its predecessor.

You know, this whole Preservation mess really makes me appreciate Tommy and Quadrophenia that much more. Tommy had a dippy plot, yes, but it was a clever dippy plot, and it had a ton of great riffs and pleasantly low-key instrumentation. Quadrophenia was kinda overblown, but its storyline is the polar opposite of simplistic and banal. I mean, the second half of that album isn't even a "story" in the conventional sense; it's just Jimmy walking along the beach having a bunch of flashbacks and doing a bunch of self-contemplation. And the music, well, if you don't think that 3/4's of Quadrophenia is among the very greatest material done by the Who, then we're just not on the same page. Preservation, though, ends up taking three LP's to accomplish almost nothing, and I just can't ignore that. Unless you're a very, very hardcore fan, avoid these.

THIS STORYLINE IS SO STUPID. Here's a question for you: if the purpose of The Starmaker's experiment was to prove that anybody, even somebody like Norman, can be made into a star, then wouldn't it make more sense for the plot to focus on Norman's adjustment to star life (directly relevant to the experiment) than to focus on The Starmaker's adjustment to normal life (not at all relevant to the experiment)? If Ray had at least focused some on Norman getting made into a star, this could have been a neat little precursor to the movie Trading Places; as is, it quickly becomes clear that Ray doesn't really care about the plot, which is only used as a vehicle for Ray to elaborate on the points he'd already made with "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," "Brainwashed" and "Shangri-La." We get it, Ray: you're glad that you don't have to live a non-musician lifestyle, requiring you to work a real job and have a boring wife and boring neighbors and everything. These ideas were cute and compelling the first time around; they're just obnoxious this time. And another thing: assuming for a second that The Starmaker isn't just a figment of Norman's imagination (I think he is, but Ray tries to make this somewhat unclear), how on earth would The Starmaker be able to disappear into non-celebrity life without anybody noticing? Wouldn't he have an agent calling for his whereabouts? Wouldn't there be articles in major newspapers about how this big star had disappeared and now there was a manhunt on for him? Sheesh, between these and a bunch of other questions that could be brought up, you'd think Ray could have bothered to think this through a little better.

That's all I'm going to say about the story. What's more pressing and more annoying is the music itself; with this album, Ray gave up basically all pretense of 'real' rock music in favor of a kind of low-grade community rock musical theater. What's more, even by the standards of low-grade community rock musical theater, this album is at best a C+; when not shoving distracting dialogue in our faces, Ray chooses to fill the time with a mix of generic broadway musical elements, 50's boogie rock and more plagiarism (some of it of himself) than I can stand. I mean, the very first thing you hear on this album is a steal of the "I Can't Explain" riff (at least when The Clash borrowed that riff a couple of years later, it was for the purpose of powerfully announcing themselves to the world; here it's just to have something for the background while Ray explains who The Starmaker is) - how's that for a bad omen? Another song, "When Work is Over," lifts its main chorus hook directly from "Under the Boardwalk"; another song, "Have Another Drink," is so similar in general feel to "Have A Cuppa Tea" that it drives me NUTS.

The parts that aren't completely stolen range from boring to tolerably ok. "Rush Hour Blues," as dorky as it is (or, more likely, because it's as dorky as it is), should be considered a minor highlight, as Ray decides to represent Norman's early-morning preparations and work commute via a Jerry Lee Lewis-style of 50's boogie; at the least, there's something kinda hypnotic about the back-and-forth vocals between Starmaker/Norman and his wife in this part. "Underneath the Neon Sign" is actually pretty lovely, a bit of soft guitar-and-piano laced pop balladry conveying Starmaker/Norman's evening stumble from the bar to the subway with all the various big-city neon signs already lit up. And you know, if I can ignore the dialogue, I actually find "You Make it All Worthwhile" kinda nice. It has what I consider the best lyric of the album ("What's the use of cracking up all because of shepherd's pie?"), and amidst its mild pleasantry there's a moment that's probably the most inspired bit of melody-writing on the album (the part where Ray sings, "Baby, you won't believe it but it's true what a boring occupation can do, it can make a nervous wreck out of you"). Yeah, there are some nice bits on this album.

My favorite track on here, though, is one that George Starostin highlighted in blue (meaning it's a low point) and that most people seem to use as the main example of the crappiness of the album. I love "Ducks on the Wall," a track that brings a smile to my face every time I hear the opening duck squeals (yeah, I know that ducks quack, but if ever ducks could make a sound resembling a squeal, it's here). It's completely ridiculous, but I refuse to believe that the band didn't have any fun at all recording a song that uses vocal-duck interplay so effectively in the chorus. It's by far the most cartoonish moment of the album, but at least it's intentionally (at least, I want to think so) cartoonish; I can't help but get the image in my head of Starmaker/Norman going crazy in the midst of the ducks, accidentally banging his head against a wall and having a bunch of ducks marching around his dizzied-up head. For better or worse, it's the most enjoyable song of the album from start to finish for me.

Unfortunately, it's not enough to completely save the album; there are a lot of tracks on here that I haven't mentioned, and for good reason. I actually find it pretty amazing that the band didn't break up at this point; Dave supposedly hates this album more than any he's ever worked on, and the criminal level of apathy towards writing good, original songs shown here is enough to make me dislike it as well. It's got more high points per 40 minutes than Preservation did, I'll give it that, but that's not saying a ton.

So anyway, while this is not a rock opera, it's still a definite concept album, and the concept this time around is life growing up in the British school system. Several generic concepts along these lines are touched upon, but Ray doesn't really have much insight to provide about any of these ideas, and that hurts the conceptuality portion of the album a lot. Capn' Marvel (Ryan Atkinson) said, in effect, that Ray seemed to have gotten all his inspiration for this album from reading Archie comics, and I have to completely agree; rarely, if ever, has an album about formative years been quite so cartoonish. School uniforms squelch creative freedom; getting dumped by your first love sucks; learning stuff is boring; getting punished by the headmaster is scary; convocation is a bittersweet moment; despite all the downs, your school years are still arguably the best time of your life. There, I mostly summed up the plotline of the album for you.

There are a couple of interesting little twists in the lyrical flow of the album, though. The first comes in "Headmaster," which features the future Mr. Flash trying to grovel his way out of getting whipped across the bum. The reason I mention this track is that the lyrics are off-the-charts ridiculous; the idea that an early teen boy would be using this kind of phrasing to ask the headmaster for forgiveness is probably the most comic-bookish idea on the album, but at least it's a non-bland idea. The second interesting idea, then, comes in "No More Looking Back," where Ray talks about how you never completely let go of the people who were important to you during your formative years. Oddly enough, this is also the track on the album I enjoy the most from a music standpoint; it's built on a foundation of rather dreamy keyboard sounds that the band had never used before, and it shows a passion in Ray's delivery that's kinda lacking elsewhere. In particular, the verse where he sings of seeing old faces everywhere he looks, but knowing that they're not really there, has the first powerful dose of emotion found on a Kinks album in a long long time.

Anyway, about the music on the rest of the album: only one track comes close to outright bad (the seemingly un-ending jammy bore of "Education"), but only a couple of them (aside from "No More Looking Back") even come close to minor classic status. The opening "Schooldays," where Ray sings of the general theme of the album without getting into the specifics (i.e. the details that reveal the banality of the whole), has some emotional singing, nice piano and guitar (and an ok melody; also, don't forget the way it makes it clear this isn't gonna be another rock opera); it's nice to have Dave sounding reasonable again. I'm also rather fond of "Hard Way" which, despite rewriting the "I Can't Explain" riff yet again, gives some actual rocking power to the album; Dave, at the least, once again sounds like he's having a blast playing simple driving chords over and over again.

Among the rest, "Jack the Idiot Dunce" and "The First Time We Fall in Love" each have a strong early Beach Boys feel (the former as a dorky 'rocker,' the latter as an ok ballad), especially in the vocals, and "I'm in Disgrace" is an ok lament on how Ray felt after getting dumped by his first love. "The Last Assembly" is kinda schlocky, though, and "Finale" is a rather pointless reprise of various album themes. And, as mentioned earlier, there's lot in the way of generic arena-rock elements to be found here, which isn't really a good thing.

Basically, this album isn't great, but at least it gave some hope for the future. It sold horrendously, though, and ended up as the last proper album done for RCA (the band put out an RCA-era greatest hits after this album). Get it before you get Preservation or Soap Opera, but that basically means to get it before the end of time.

"Prince of the Punks" is such a cool song! One might initially suspect that it would be an old-fart rant against that new-fangled punk genre, but it's really against poseurs who use the genre to look cooler than they really are (I don't buy for a second that it's actually trying to be punk). It's got a fun chorus, a decently catchy verse melody, and a neat guitar line consisting of one just hammering on one grumbling sound while the other plays a simple jangly riff that's amazingly effective. It may be improper to name this bonus track the best of the album, especially when I've technically been excluding the bonus tracks from best track consideration on previous Kinks albums, but this is such a terrific standout that I feel compelled to make an exception.

That shouldn't be considered a major indictment of the album itself, though. If you, like me, have trouble listening to the four Kinks albums previous to this one and get annoyed wondering what on earth happened to Ray's talent during that time, here's some advice: just pretend that The Kinks broke up in 1972 and that this is their reunion album. Seriously, this totally works as a first comeback album; it's nowhere near spectacular, but it betrays a start-to-finish competence that just didn't exist after the final notes of "Celluloid Heroes" died down on Everybody's in Showbiz. Yes, the songs could have been written by many groups other than The Kinks, and in a lot of cases feel like they have previously been written by groups other than The Kinks (from now on, idiosyncracy and serious originality was actively shunned by the group), but the songs are all, at the least, pretty ok. Many of them tend to fall back on elements of arena rock (there's a LOT of generic 'heavenly' soloing from Dave on here, who at least sounds pretty competent in this vein), but none of them come close to Foreigner-esque schlock. It does get a little annoying to realize that Ray is trying to make this album as generically palatable as possible, and that he REALLY REALLY wanted a hit single to come off of this (which didn't really happen), but I'll get over it.

Mentioning all the tracks on this album would be kinda pointless (they all sound ok, but they do sorta blend in together), but a few are worth namechecking. The opening "Life on the Road" is a nice, lightweight (both in feel and thematically; it does a good job of suggesting right away that this will not be another concept album, thank goodness) 'rocker' that feels a lot like Bob Seger, but since the melody is ok I don't hold that against it. "Juke Box Music" is a cute, blatant attempt at a 'throwback' hit, the MOR ballads "Stormy Sky" and "Full Moon" (which kinda feels like mid-period Procol Harum) both have decent enough melodies to rise above background status, and the closing "Life Goes On" actually sounds like it has something resembling passion (which is otherwise largely missing on this album). And hey, among the bonus tracks, "Artificial Light" and "The Poseur" might scream out filler, but aside from "Prince of the Punks" there's also an effective gloomy (mostly courtesy of the keyboards) pop number courtesy of "On the Outside" that certainly should have been included on the main album.

I guess the biggest thing that I want to get across is that, despite Ray's desperate attempt to get a hit single out of these sessions, these songs really work better in aggregate than they seem when listened to individually. Consistent competence should be given its due, even if that's a low bar to set for somebody who had as many great songs under his belt as Ray did by this time. For that reason, I give this a solid 9; this may not be the best that one can get from The Kinks, but it's definitely the best that could have come from The Kinks at this point.

It also doesn't help that Ray clearly put more emphasis on lyrics than on melodies in crafting this album. It's funny to me that, in the liner notes, the author raves about Ray's diverse songwriting prowess on this album, and then immediately cites the diverse lyrical subject matter of the album instead of saying anything about the actual music. Well, if lyrics are more important to you than the music when listening to Kinks albums, I suppose I can see where this album could be dear to you; as suggested by the title, the songs are mostly about people who, for whatever reason, don't fit in with the world around them, and I can't argue against that striking a chord with somebody. Not that the lyrics are that good, mind you: Ray might have been trying his hand at character sketches again, but this is nowhere close to the level that Something Else reached. But anyway, the point is that Ray apparently decided that the best outlet for his creative idiosyncracies was in writing about unusual topics, and not in writing very interesting music.

Of the ten tracks, only four have left me with any reasonable desire to hear them again. The best of these is the opening title track, which actually has some nice melody twists that probably make this Ray's best ballad since "Celluloid Heroes." The sound of it is awfully generic, of course, but I can ignore that in favor of the various positives it has. Two of the other tracks I enjoy happen to be the most lightweight lyrically on the album: "Hay Fever" quickly turns from sounding like a potentially somber ballad into a jolly Muswell-style rocker about allergies, and "Permanent Waves" is a fun pop song about breaking out of depression after getting a new hairstyle. And finally, as much as the overall sound and arrangement makes me cringe, I manage to find a good deal of resonance in "Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy," where Ray sings about how he doesn't want to be one of those guys who sits in their room listening to music all day to escape reality. Frankly, I've been in the shoes of both Ray and the guy he's talking about; I've shut myself away from the world, indulging in musical pleasures, and I've watched with pity as others have done the same. Yup, if there's one song on here that would resonate with most fans of the band, it would be this one (even if, again, the sound of the song is kinda slick and gross).

I really don't have much use for the rest of the album, though. "Black Messiah" was just a poorly conceived song all around; if you take away the (potentially offensive, but not really) lyrics, what you're left with is very watered-down reggae. "Out of the Wardrobe" is an extremely flimsy ballad about a crossdresser (um, wasn't this territory mined already?), "Live Life" and "Get Up" are arena rock schlock of the highest caliber, "Trust Your Heart" is a rather ugly Dave-penned ballad-to-screamer multi-part number, and "In a Foreign Land" has completely eluded me after numerous listens. The melodies and riffs on these songs are all mediocre at the very best, and the sound just kills them all completely for me.

In the end, this is a disappointing (to me) followup to Sleepwalker. Many fans consider this one of the best of the latter-day Kinks albums, but the only way I can see that as possible is if somebody's priorities of what goes into a good album are drastically different from mine. Oddly enough, these are probably the same priorities that would make somebody consider Something Else the best Kinks album; make no mistake, though, this isn't in the same league as SE.

PS: The one bonus track here that's not just a single remix of an album track is a terrific up-tempo pop-rocker called Father Christmas, which has a great melody and some amusing lyrics about Santa getting mugged. Related to this song, I want to share the following story, taken some years back from a message board I read:

"In 1977, the Kinks released a single called 'Father Christmas', just in time for the Holidays. Of course, true to Mr. Ray Davies, the song was quite cynical about Christmas and thus didn't sell very well.

Anyway, in mid-December that year, the Kinks did a special Christmas show in London. During this period, they would usually finish off the shows with 'You Really Got Me'. But, for this special show, they decided to ditch that song all together and instead do 'Father Christmas' as the final encore. Ray also came up with the brilliant idea that, in true yuletide spirit, he would dress up as Santa Claus for that one song.

So, the idea was that, before the final encore, Ray would quickly change into his Santa outfit backstage while the other guys walked on stage. Then, with everyone set, Ray would make his grand entrance as Santa Claus and the band would launch into the song.

However, Dave decided to pull a little improvised prank on his brother. As soon as Dave saw Ray enter the stage dressed up as Santa, he instead went into the familiar opening riff to 'You Really Got Me'. The band followed suite and the audience went crazy. Ray was completely dumbfounded. Here he was in full Santa Claus costume, expecting to do his his biting ode to Christmas and instead having to sing 'You Really Got Me' from under his fake beard. He had no choice but to play along. Every once in a while, Ray looked over to his brother, snarling and sneering. The audience didn't know what was going on - they probably just thought it was a seasonal gesture on Ray's part. His way of saying 'merry Christmas'.

As soon as they got off stage, Ray exploded - hurling insults and names at his brother, finishing it all off with throwing his beard at him.

As Dave writes in his autobiography, he had never 'had a Santa Claus call me a fucking cunt before'."

I mean, just look at a song like "Catch Me Now I'm Falling." As Mark Prindle said, it basically repeats 3 parts 400,000 times apiece, and it has the audacity to have the clearest outright THEFT (of another artist's work: Ray would steal more blatantly from himself on the next studio album) in the band's whole catalogue thanks to the "Jumping Jack Flash" imitation of the riff. But here's the thing: all those parts are GOOD, and I'm pleased as punch to hear that riff and Ray singing, "Now I'm calling all citizens from all over the world, this is Captain America calling" or "Now I call your office on the telephone, and your secretary tells me that she's sorry, but you've gone out of town" over and over again. It's overlong, it's completely unoriginal, and it's cheesy as hell, but it's catchy, anthemic and it makes me happy every time I hear it. What a great song.

The immortal classic, of course, is the disco-rock bliss of "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman." This song is so tacky that it really shouldn't work; from the porno baseline to the cheap lyrical cliches (though the lines where he describes his morning routine are endearingly cute) to the big big distorted guitar sounds, it almost feels like Ray's saying, "Ok, seriously guys, if I don't get a hit out of this, I'm taking my stuff and going home" with every single note. That I think it rules, and that lots of people with otherwise vaguely 'respectable' taste think likewise, just kinda blows my mind. Whatever may be, though, the song proves that even somebody as honkified as Ray Davies could get lucky (and believe me, he got lucky: there's no way in HELL this song should work as a Kinks song) in trying his hand at trashy dance music, and rules from start to finish.

The rest of the album has its definite ups and downs, but leaves a good impression overall. Relative low points would probably have to be "In a Space" (which is just a bit too hollow and screamy for my tastes), Misery (I still have no idea how this pop punk number goes) and "Gallon of Gas" (proving that The Kinks still can't convincingly play 'black' music), but I don't hate any of them. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm totally sold on things like the opening "Attitude" (with a fascinating guitar pattern and fun "doot doot ..." backing vocals in the chorus), "Pressure" (a number that would have fit in marvelously on Some Girls: it's Chuck Berry crossed with punk, after all), the title track (a great stomping rocker with a hilarious vocal performance and lyrics about, well, living life as a poor person) and even the nice ballad "Little Bit of Emotion," which provides an effective interlude amidst the endless barrage of high-quality cheese. Oh, and while neither "National Health" nor the closing "Moving Pictures" particularly excite me, I don't mind having them on one bit.

So basically, while this will never be one of my very favorite Kinks albums, mainly because I have little desire to become a complete idiot, it's still a necessity just for the novelty factor. This is one of the most over-the-top sellouts I've ever heard from a major artist, but it's also one of the most successful sellouts in terms of getting me to enjoy it, and that can't be ignored. If you want to get into the Arista era of the band, this is probably the place to start... as long as you have a sense of humor.

The big highlight of the album actually wasn't on the original CD pressing (though on the original double LP and on the remastered version), but I was able to hunt down a copy of the track online, so I was able to partake of the greatness of this version of "20th Century Man." Ray's delivery crescendos into screaming fury much quicker here than on the original, and it works surprisingly well over the blaring guitars. It's also one of only a couple of times on the album where Ray does an older track and doesn't sound like he's just including it because he has to promote the "fathers of hard rock" image (I mean, this rocks harder than anything else on the album, but it's one of the few times when an older 'rocking' track actually feels like a necessity on this album).

The two true "ballads" of the album, "Misfits" and "Celluloid Heroes," each go off very well. Dave's 'majestic' soloing at the beginning of the latter is a little over the top, but it's not the worst experience in the world, and the song itself is done rather passionately. The closest thing to a ballad on the rest of the album, though, is the soft beginning of "Catch Me Now I'm Falling"; the rest (except for a very throwaway version of "Stop Your Sobbing" and a totally perfunctory "Lola" with an audience singalong) is rock rock rock, and it's both fun and tedious. I won't describe the rest; you can probably look at the track listing, imagine what the songs would sound like with erratically-recorded heavy guitars, and make a good guess on what the whole album sounds like.

Basically, this is a decent live offering, but except for the great runthrough of "20th Century Man," it's not even close to essential. If you feel compelled to get live Kinks, get To the Bone instead, but if you've already gotten that, then look for this cheap.

One thing that got preserved from Low Budget was the willingness to steal without hesitation from anything, including himself. "Destroyer" was a moderate hit, but that can only be attributed to the absolutely jaw-dropping blatant theft of the vocal melody from "All Day and All of the Night" (with lyrical references to "Lola"); the man had absolutely no shame by this point, and I can't help but absolutely hate this song in its entirety. The rest of the album doesn't have any rips quite that blatant, but many of the tracks have a very strong sense of, "I've heard this before, I just don't know where" that can't be shaken. I was able to largely ignore that same sense on Low Budget because I liked the songs so much on the whole, but here, it's an aggravating factor towards seriously disliking the album.

Another track that I would very happily never hear again is "Art Lover," Ray's ode to a guy that likes watching little girls just a biiiiiiiiit too much. I'm just not convinced by the protagonist's pleas that he's not a flasher or a kidnapper or whatever, so what he does is ok. Hey, Mr. "Art Lover": YOU'RE OBSESSED WITH LITTLE GIRLS, THAT MEANS YOU'RE A PERVERT. How in the hell can people defend this song??!! I don't care that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis wrote songs about obsessions with young girls years before this: it's not hard to tell that Ray meant this song to be more of a "work of art" than anything those two ever wrote, and that makes it all the more disturbing. Oh, and the melody is weak and flaccid, if you want a music-based criticism.

The rest of the album consists of two nice ballads and a whole lot of dull, lifeless metallic mush. The closing "Better Things" brings a long overdue uplifting vibe to the album that goes well with a decent melody, and "Yo Yo" has a nice light echoey guitar part that brings a good contrast to the uninspired heaviness of the tracks all around it. The rest, for the most part, doesn't commit many sins except ones of omission; I don't particularly hate anything, but there's nothing I really like, and over this many tracks that can't help but be a problem. The lyrics don't help either: once again, Ray tried to sneak in a relatively 'serious' concept, about something related to materialism vs freedom (or something), and once again his concept managed to suck almost all the fun out of the album. This album desperately needs a silly groove like "Pressure" or "Low Budget," and none like them can be found.

Truth be told, except for the first Preservation album, this is probably my least favorite Kinks album so far. At least with Misfits, I could understand why somebody would rate that very highly; here, I just don't get the appeal. Proceed with caution.

The biggest difference between this album and the last one is the quality of the softer numbers (including among the bonus tracks, from which the best track comes). All five pop ballads are among the very best of the Arista years, and show Ray effectively pulling off a classy kind of 'neo-retro' sound that he'd only used a couple of times during that era. They don't show an enormous amount of originality, as usual, but we're used to that by now, right? "Come Dancing" is a very fun lightweight 50's-ish number about how great it was for his sister to spend hours in childhood dancing the night away, and "Don't Forget to Dance," blatant ripoff of "Misfits" it might be, is a nice song about keeping a positive attitude about things when life gets rough (a common lyrical theme from Ray by now). "Property" (which has a GREAT synth texture underpinning the nice melody) and "Heart of Gold" are solid pop songs, and "Long Distance" (the aforementioned bonus track) has a magnificent climax in its chorus that comes closer than anything here to evoking memories of Ray's glory days from the 60's. These pop songs really exemplify my ideal for the band during this period, and would all make it onto a self-made compilation of the period.

Of course, being early 80's Kinks, the rest of the album consists of the band's attempts at *snicker* heavy metal, but strangely enough things are significantly better this time around. The album actually starts off with three straight rockers in this vein, and while two of them completely blow ("Definite Maybe" is a bore through and through, and "Labour of Love" starts with a guitar playing "Here Comes the Bride" and only goes downhill from there), the opening title track is actually kinda decent. It's thin-sounding, but the riffage is ok, and Ray's delivery has a good amount of power, especially when he gets to the, "... it's a STATE! Of Confusion!" chorus. The closing "Bernadette" has a silly and kinda lame steal from the riff of "Birthday" (Beatles), and the bonus track "Once a Thief" is totally dismissable, but these are more than compensated by "Young Conservatives" (clever social commentary about complacency serving as a breeding ground for conservative ideology, and with a well-crafted energetic groove to boot) and "Cliches of the World (B Movie)," a song about longing for an escape from the predictable tedium of life. And I mustn't forget the bonus track "Noise," a neat track about how sick Ray is of not having any refuge from the nonstop noise of the world around him.

All this said, I don't want to give the impression that this is a great album. The songwriting is surprisingly strong, but it's strong by the standards of late-period Kinks, which means it's not the most amazing thing in the entire world. There's also the issue of the overall sound; for one thing, Ray decided to cover pretty much everything in very dated 80's synths, which work great with the softer numbers but sound mildly disastrous with the heavier sounds. For another thing, all these 'heavy' guitars sound awfully thin, mainly because the heaviness comes entirely from Dave and not from any of the nearly non-existent bass. These factors and others are sufficiently distracting that there's simply no way that this album can get higher than a 9, which is quite good but nevertheless worse than should probably be merited by the melodies and riffs.

Regardless, though, this is definitely one of the high points of the Arista era, and may be even more essential than Low Budget (though definitely not as hilariously amusing). It's definitely the best 80's Kinks album, and unfortunately the last good one that they ever put together.

To the album's credit, the songs that start and end the album are standouts. "Do it Again" is totally Kinks-by-numbers, as Mark Prindle called it, and its anthemic qualities are fairly cheap (like the rest of the album), but it still has a solid amount of optimistic power, and it has good riffs and a cool echoey chorus, so it's a keeper. The closing "Going Solo" is a clear attempt to recapture the feel of "Come Dancing" musically, but it's awfully pleasant, and it leaves a nice taste in my mouth at the end. So yeah, the album has some good material.

The rest of the album is just kinda icky. One song that often gets credit from people is the Dave-penned ballad "Living on a Thin Line," but regardless of the decent lyrics, I just can't enjoy the song that much. One thing that really irritates me about it is Dave's singing, which may be a surprise given how much better he sounds here than he has in the past; he's much less hoarse and rough around the edges than elsewhere. That's just the thing, though: his voice is so cleaned up that it's practically sterilized, and the person singing might as well be one of a thousand anonymous Brits. I want Dave to sound like Dave, even if that means the bad sides of it.

The rest is the rest. The title track is a rocker with an UGLY thin introductory guitar sound and no decent riffs whatsoever, the boring-as-hell "Good Day" has one of the most hilariously useless sound effects (a couple of watch beeps) ever in its first five seconds, the ballad "Missing Persons" forgets to have anything resembling a good melody, "Massive Reductions" was begging for jokes about Ray never having had anything to do with factories from the moment it was created ... man, I might be overrating this album after all. Ehn, well, "Summer's Gone" is a nice little nostalgic ballad, and "Too Hot" is enjoyably goofy, so those help a bit.

Basically, apart from a strong start and finish, this album is almost useless. It's not the nastiest background noise ever, but it's not something I'd ever want to listen to again. Don't buy it.

Too bad the songwriting is still boring. None of the songs sound offensively bad, but none of them are great, either, which means that the whole album pretty much falls into the 'moderately ok' category. I do find the opening "Working at the Factory" a small cut above the rest, unlike many who use this song (like "Massive Reductions" on the last album) as a chance to make snide remarks about Ray not knowing anything about factory life. No, Ray hadn't had to spend his life working at a factory, but the notion that he would have been doomed to life in a factory were it not for music is something that legitimately seemed to scare him, and it shows. His passion, both about how glad he was to get out of being a factory worker, and his frustration with the way the music business revealed itself as "just another factory," is evident throughout, and largely enough to make the song a very minor classic.

The other songs completely betray the greatest weakness of the band during this era: a shockingly low level of original ideas. "Welcome to Sleazy Town" is based around a simple bluesy riff that sounds hilariously like the one from "Misunderstanding" by Genesis, "Natural Gift" comes up with another variation on the "I Can't Explain" riff, "Repetition" reminds me of two John Lennon songs ("Intuition" and "Nobody Told Me"), and the closing Dave-sung "When You Were a Child" sounds so much like it could have been done by any 80's synth pop band that I wondered if there was a mistake on my CD the first couple of times I heard it. Dave's vocals are reduced to the same anonymous-sounding mush that they were on "Living on a Thin Line," and the melody is amazingly undistinctive. I actually kinda liked it the first time I heard it, but I've liked it less and less with each succeeding listen.

Still, none of the aforementioned songs are terrible, and a couple of others (like the pleasant ballad "Lost and Found" and the hilariously stupid 'rocker' "Rock'n'Roll Cities") are a decent way to kill a couple of minutes. The rest is also not bad, just underwritten, and deserves neither positive nor negative namechecking.

Basically, this album is a great example of the power of lowered expectations. My impression of the album should be driven primarily by the incredible mediocrity of the songwriting; instead, despite the boredom that oozes out of almost every song, I'm thrilled that the sound is as easy to swallow as it is. If you're somebody that's predisposed to like anything Ray writes, you might even find this to be a minor classic. I'm not such a person, but I still think this is ok, and I'd recommend it ahead of a lot of their other albums.

Weirdly enough, the album sticks all three Dave-penned tracks onto the very end, rather than spreading them out amidst the Ray blather. The Dave-EP is dumb rock in the grand Dave tradition, but it's still a lot of fun, and it's nice that he avoids any blatant metalisms in his guitar sounds. It's a little weird that he decides to take on politics in "Dear Margaret," but energetic stupid bitterness is largely preferable to the boring stupid bitterness that makes up much of the rest of the album. "Perfect Strangers" is a really nice anthemic rocker too.

Basically, at this point, The Kinks were completely done. If Ray's lyrics are especially important to you, and you share a lot of his bitterness towards the modern world, you might get a kick out of it, but the music is almost totally irrelevant. The album's out of print now, so it's probably not worth your time to look for (though I suppose if you find it used it might be worth spending a buck to hear "Aggravation").

Admittedly, a few songs are a clear cut above the rest: "It's Alright (Don't Think About It)" has a riff that I kinda like, "Somebody Stole My Car" is a fun lightweight pop song, and the lengthy "Hatred (A Duet)" is a fun in-joke about how much Ray and Dave despised each other. But the rest, rocker and ballad alike (with the possible exception of the tolerable "Wall of Fire"), is among the worst material Ray ever wrote (especially the title track). The ballad problem is especially crippling; the last bits and pieces of Ray's individuality apparently vanished before these sessions, and I don't see anything in these tracks that couldn't have been replicated by any one of a thousand anonymous hacks. I just don't see, barring considering Ray an infallible God whose every utterance is axiomatically one of greatness, how these songs can be considered anything even resembling good.

There are also so many little things to complain about with this album that I don't know it's worth it to try (though one thing that better symbolizes the overpowering banality of the album than anything else is that one of the songs repeatedly features the line, "Everybody's a victim of society." He's not even trying anymore.). This album just sucks: the public knew it, Columbia knew it (the band was dropped after this album) and, judging from the fact that this was their last album, I think The Kinks knew it too. A band can only stretch mediocrity so far, and this is where they snapped. Avoid.

One thing that's noteworthy about this album is that it has a rather unusual structure for a live album. A number of tracks are clearly from "regular" shows, but a large portion of the album comes from a series of live-in-the-studio (or live in front of a very small number of people) performances. One stretch even features Ray doing an impromptu acoustic set at the start of a show when none of the rest of the band had arrived yet; it's a LOT of fun hearing Ray do acoustic renditions of "Sunny Afternoon" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and an acoustic introduction to "Do it Again" before the whole band breaks into a roaring version of the same track.

Gosh, this album is just full of win. The band seems to have finally remembered how to effectively cross its hard rock leanings with just the right intensity and guitar sounds, and this makes the harder numbers ("All Day," "Got Me," "State of Confusion") work as well as they ever had. The band pulls off arena rock bliss (a word combination I don't use much) in this version of "Set Me Free," which has extremely effective soloing, and in its slowed-down but still intense version of "I'm Not Like Everybody Else." The poppy songs played in front of a big audience ("Lola," "Come Dancing," "Dead End Street") are a ton of fun, and "Days" is as beautiful as ever (kudos must be given to Ray here and elsewhere for doing such a good job singing this late into his career).

The live-in-the-studio stuff is a lot of fun, too. Coming out of a giant sounding "All Day ..." into an in-studio version of "Apeman" is slightly jarring, but this accordion-driven version of "Apeman" is so pretty and so much fun that I don't mind at all. Other major highlights of the in-studio set on disc one are "See My Friends" (transformed from a weird Easterny number into something resembling a normal pop song, and not terribly worse for it), a delightful Dave showcase in "Death of a Clown," and a spirited rendition of "Muswell Hillbilly." In disc two's in-studio set, we get renditions of three VGPS songs, all done well. The title track and the slowed-down "Do You Remember Walter?," in particular, are more beautiful in their combined six minutes than probably the most beautiful six minutes on all of the previous decade's Kinks albums.

The album's not perfect, of course, but it's perfectly effective as a decent career retrospective. One thing that could have helped, for instance, would have been to, just once, bring in a harpsichord. I mean, for an album that's so clearly aiming at the nostalgia market, it sure does ignore a huge chunk of the band's former shtick. Regardless, that's just a minor gripe, and I very heavily recommend this album for any Kinks fan. It also helps that the final two tracks, newly recorded for the occasion, are actually halfway decent, and definitely miles above the quality of the typical Phobia track.