Just finished listening to basically every album by the Kinks a week or so ago. I get into these moods sometimes, where I go through an artist's entire discography, or through a Pitchfork top albums of whatever decade list, and a few weeks ago it occurred to me that what I needed in my life was to subject the Kinks to this treatment.
I'd say I have a healthy respect for them, borne of owning a couple of studio albums (including Village Green Preservation Society) and a greatest hits compilation. I may not hold them up quite as high as the Beatles in my ranking of British pop bands from the 60s, but they may have a more consistent oeuvre from that decade than The Who, which is another favorite and which is currently receiving the same whole-discography treatment.
Unlike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I didn't grow up with the Kinks being played all the time around me. I don't think I heard of them for the first time until Weird Al's parody of "Lola" or until the Britpop thing was underway, and that was mainly in reference to how Damon Albarn's songwriting was clearly indebted to Ray Davies's slice-of-life style. And somewhere in those years I started hearing more about them, until I decided I should just get a greatest hits album to find out what the fuss was all about.
The first thing I discovered was that I actually did know some of their music, since I'd heard songs like "You Really Got Me" over the years. I'd just never known it was them. The next thing was the diversity of their body of work from those years, since those early singles were very different indeed from the likes of "Waterloo Sunset" or "Dedicated Follower of Fashion".
From there I had to get a handle on the idea that the compilation I owned wasn't particularly comprehensive. While it had "Lola" on it, I soon learned that other albums like Village Green Preservation Society weren't represented. After college I went through an initial "music archeologist" phase, as a friend once called it, and gathered Village Green and Face to Face on CD, because they'd been mentioned on a few top British album lists I'd read.
The next thing I did was check out their discography on Allmusic, and that's where I discovered that they hadn't actually broken up until 1996, and had indeed continued making albums of varying quality throughout the years that, it seemed, no one was actually paying attention to them. I remained intrigued by this lost period, and haunted by the statement (I can't remember by whom) that if they'd broken up at the same time as the Beatles they'd have been legends.
So when I listened to all their albums on YouTube the aim was to fill in these gaps and see for myself how good those albums were. I also wanted to get the foundation, from their earliest albums, so that I could hear how their sound evolved from proto-hard rock to English-influenced gentility, and what that turned into.
The main thing I took away from the Allmusic history of the band was that the early 70s, when Ray Davies was insisting on concept albums around celebrity and whatever else, were a pretty terrible period for them. And I can confirm that this is the case, even if the albums aren't completely unlistenable.
What did surprise me was learning how much they improved in the latter half of the decade. Sleepwalkers, their first straight-ahead rock album since the early ones, isn't necessarily a classic (and has a pretty crap cover) but was surprisingly enjoyable. It and its follow ups sounded like the work of a guy in his thirties figuring out again what he's good at and going with that. The other thing that surprised me was that they were all clearly Kinks songs, with Davies's voice and songwriting keeping a line of continuity with some of the best of the 60s, even as they turned into a sort of cut-price Rolling Stones (and I have to admit that I'm both looking forward to and dreading going through that discography) in the 80s.
It's true that by the time they released Phobia, their final album of all original songs, they were sounding pretty tired, though even that album has some high points. But it was so interesting as I listened to those albums to consider what was happening around them in music. While they went for a more traditional English pastoral sound, other British bands were getting louder and heavier.
Later on, Sleepwalkers and Misfits don't make much reference to what was happening in punk, while the albums of the 80s occupy a different universe than the post-punk and synth-pop that was coming out of that decade. And the greatest irony of all is that they broke up just as the British music scene was starting to rediscover them. Phobia came out the same year that Blur released Modern Life is Rubbish, their own foray into British iconography, and the Kinks broke up completely in 1996, the year that Britpop was at its height.
Throughout it all, I was most intrigued by what Ray Davies was thinking as he and the band wrote, recorded and released each of their albums after their heyday. Clearly people were still buying the albums, even if only out of deference to the band's history, but it must have been odd to be so firmly out of the musical zeitgeist. Though it's also fair to say that their music always went counter to the trends being set by the Beatles, Stones or Who in the 60s and 70s.
Thinking back to the idea that they'd have been legends if they'd broken up after Muswell Hillbillies, it's probably true. Albums like Preservation Acts 1 and 2, Everybody's in Showbiz, and Schoolboys in Disgrace are just silly and indulgent (and have some of the worst covers ever). But even if they never again hit the heights of Village Green Preservation Society, it was rewarding discovering those albums when they changed direction toward hard rock. They may not deserve to be in your iTunes collection, but they deserve a listen.
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