The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

Kinks, The

album cover

A Kinks View of Pastoral England

For more than thirty years, the Kinks have been one of the most misunderstood bands in rock, beloved by an elite few while being ignored by the masses. Musicians heap on the highest praise—the Who's Pete Townshend described this album as Ray Davies's Sgt. Pepper, a work that "makes him the definitive pop poet laureate." And yet, in America at least, the Kinks' profile is a notch above "cult curiousity."

One explanation: The group was a moving target, evolving at lightning speed. From its early incarnation as an R&B-influenced bar band ("All Day and All of the Night") through a brief psychedelic phase through the period of almost perverse British nostalgia epitomized by Village Green, the Kinks created great music that was a bit (and sometimes a lot) ahead of the curve. Village Green is the most extravagant example of this: After developing a following for brash, tightly jabbing guitar pop, Davies and his cohorts went profoundly acoustic here, replacing terse hooks with pub sing-alongs and wordy evocations of an imagined simpler time. There are oompah refrains and dashes of music-hall finery, odes to strawberry jam and sounds you might encounter in a prim English village square of yesteryear.

Some have conjectured that Davies felt the need to respond to the conceptual works created by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1967 and '68, yet was determined not to follow along too closely. His solution was to conjure an idealized place, a town not unlike Fortis Green, the one where he grew up. Davies's characters wax nostalgic over old photographs and lost friends, then look outward, on tracks like the idyllic perspective exercise "Big Sky" or a throaty lament about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains." And as is true of all of Davies's best work, the brilliantly developed characters exhibit more shades of emotional gray than most pop-song protagonists. The music might suggest that these poor souls just walked out of some nostalgic Charles Dickens tableau, but the sharp, caustic descriptions speak eerily and effectively about the plight of modern man.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1970, Reprise/Earmark
Key Tracks: "Do You Remember Walter," "Big Sky," "Picture Book."
Catalog Choice: Muswell Hillbillies; Misfits; Something Else
Next Stop: Big Star: Radio City
After That: Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism
Book Pages: 427–428

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Comments:

#1 from Michael, Lancashire - 07/21/2010 3:35

A friend introduced me to this and i fell in love with it. A brilliant concept album, perfectly captures a sense of a time-gone-by. Has some of our family’s favourite sing-along tracks to boot!

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