By Ray Davies was well into his British class-consciousness period. The previous year's The Village Green Preservation Society is his undisputed classic, but the follow-up LP surveys the social implications of the politics and culture behind the issues even further.
Great riff too. But Dave Davies' mid-song solo is a quick, tidy hit of pure rock and roll adrenaline. There's not much to it, but that's his style and timeless contribution to rock history.
This early Kinks single was the first to ease up on the frantic guitar attacks established on previous hits like "You Really Got Me" see No. But there's still plenty of power in Dave Davies' ringing guitar riff and the band's super-tight performance. The follow-up to the breakthrough "You Really Got Me" is a similar-sounding distortion-fueled rocker based on basic, but totally effective power chords.
Like in many of the Kinks' early hits, Dave Davies tosses off an ear-piercing solo in "All Day and All of the Night" that takes on a life of its own. Barely a year into their career, and Ray Davies was already getting bored with the three-chord guitar assaults the Kinks were discharging.
After a four-year commercial dry spell that coincided with Ray Davies' increasingly sophisticated songwriting, the Kinks rocketed back into the Top 10 with one of their most popular songs. Face To Face from feels like the moment something changed for The Kinks: almost entirely written by Ray Davies, who had a nervous breakdown just before they went into record, the album is much softer and more anglicised than the albums that come before it. The album that marked Ray Davies taking over on production from Shel Talmy, you can really feel The Kinks' signature sound on here: a sort of brassier, more rotund and red-nosed version of the big, sweeping sounds you hear from other bands in the mid-to-late s.
Davies is great at observation, but here that turns into something even greater: empathy. If you want to picture a perfect day in British music, it is perhaps the day this album — and The Beatles' White Album — were released on November 22 If the album is a matryoshka of delights, then its title song is a masterpiece of irony, reference and symbolism.
Nobody gets to be loved in a Kinks song if they can help it. Arthur , often rightly praised as one of the great concept albums, was originally intended to be used in a Granada television play about a carpet layer. Inspired by Ray and Dave visiting their sister, Rose, after she moved with her husband to a designed community in Adelaide, it does what The Kinks do — and Arthur does over and over again — best.
Lola Versus Powerman was that rare thing for The Kinks: a great album that managed to be a commercial success. He viewed the Carnaby Street elite with disdain, and this brilliant send up of a London Dandy desperate to stay in style hilariously nailed the narcissism of the times. Paul McCartney envied this ahead-of-its-time single but Ray was crushed by its comparative failure.
This top-three single is a wonderful tribute to the most beautiful season, and to normal everyday British life. Roast beef, rustling leaves and joy of joys, football on a Saturday, are just some of the seemingly mundane pleasures celebrated, on a song as wonderfully mellow as autumn itself.
Peerless satire from Ray Davies here marked a pronounced stylistic shift in his songwriting. You can bet Pete Townsend was listening closely too. Dear old Auntie Beeb got all excited about the mention of Coca-Cola in the lyrics but failed to look beyond the ambiguity of the lyrics.
Seventeen-year-old Dave Davies applied a razor blade to his amp, creating the infinitely influential scuzz on the riff that drives this primal, almost unbearably exciting record.
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