4. Face To Face (1966)
While not quite as timeless as the run of albums that would follow it, Face To Face is a bright, punchy snapshot of The Kinks' swift evolution from R&B string-maulers to refined, sophisticated songsmiths. Bouncy, cheeky tunes like "Dandy" and "A House In The Country" are drawn back to earth by the magnificently glum "Rainy Day In June" and droning "Fancy." Both ends of that spectrum, though, are grafted with buoyant harmony and empathy in "Sunny Afternoon."
5. Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
Choosing between Lola Versus Powerman and Muswell Hillbillies is tough. But a freewheeling fun almost gushes out of the latter, a sense of shambolic glory that propels Muswell into The Kinks' top tier. Sure, there's gravitas galore—the disc is named for the Davies' native London neighborhood of Muswell Hill, but it harnesses a world's worth of ennui even while name-checking rural America. And songs like "Alcohol" are amply and appropriately intoxicating.
Alcohol by The Kinks
Demerits:
Preservation: Act 2 (1974): Preservation: Act 1, bloated as it was, had some decent songs and at least one true keeper in "Sweet Lady Genevieve." Its sequel is twice as long and half as good: Swollen to a double album and peopled by barely sketched characters operating within a flimsy plot, Act 2 is a tedious example of Ray Davies at his hammed-up worst.
Word Of Mouth (1984): Failing miserably to capitalize on the good will generated by "Come Dancing" the year before, Word Of Mouth is a painfully backward-looking album whose opening track, the aptly (and sadly) titled "Do It Again," recycles the band's own 20-year-old riff from "She's Got Everything." In spite of a few random bursts of energy and beauty, the rest of the album sounds dated and deflated. Self-mythology never rang so hollow.
Think Visual (1986): Weirdly—and surely accidentally—the song "Lost And Found" from Think Visual employs the same distinct guitar hook as The Smiths' "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side," which was released mere weeks later. The unavoidable comparison, however, only makes "Lost And Found" sound worse: Adequately catchy yet ploddingly dull, the track could be a particularly bland Dire Straits B-side. Sadly, it's also about as electrifying as Think Visual gets.
UK Jive (1989), Phobia (1993): Um, these are just bad.
Miscellany:
The Kinks, like all great bands, have been subject to revisionist history. One such injustice is the disregard given their pre-Face To Face albums. Sure, early songs like "Stop Your Sobbin'," 'Set Me Free," and "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion" receive a decent amount of attention, but discs like 1965's Kink Kontroversy tend to get overlooked. Which is a shame: Easily the best of the band's first four full-lengths, Kontroversy features winners like the spectral "Ring The Bells," the tough yet sugary "When I See That Girl Of Mine," and the hit single "Till The End Of The Day"—not the mention the anthemic "Where Have All The Good Times Gone." Essential '70s collections like Kink Kronikles and The Great Lost Kinks Album helped round up more stragglers like "She's Got Everything" and the elegiac "I'm Not Like Everybody Else."
Another great Kontroversy track is "I Am Free"—which also happens to be Dave Davies' first standout lead vocal for The Kinks. The tension and competition between Ray and Dave is probably both more and less dramatic than it's been portrayed in the press over the years, but one fact is incontrovertible: Ray put a limit on his little brother's contributions to The Kinks after "Death Of A Clown" became a huge hit for the band in 1967. Dave's been lucky to eke out one composition per album ever since. But, oh, what compositions they are: More erratic and organic than Ray, Dave produced a body of tunes in the '60s that—had they been assembled, which was the plan until a frustrated Dave aborted the solo project—equal almost any album in The Kinks' catalogue. From "Love Me Till The Sun Shines" and "Mindless Child Of Motherhood" to the fragile "This Man He Weeps Tonight" and "Susannah's Still Alive," Dave's golden-age songs are sad and soulful, gruff and muscular. And then there are his bona fide solo singles from the late '60s, "Lincoln County" and "Hold My Hand," both of which appear on the double-disc collection Unfinished Business: Dave Davies Kronikles 1963-1998.
As fate would have it, Dave wouldn't release his first solo album until 1980, and they've all been pretty spotty since, including last year's shaky Fractured Mindz. (Keep in mind this is the man who confessed in his autobiography Kink that he's been in communion with an extraterrestrial intelligence since the early '80s.) But there's just something about Dave's flamboyant yet underdog spirit—plus the near-fatal stroke he suffered in 2004—that keeps most Kinks fans perpetually rooting for him.
Since The Kinks went on indefinite hiatus in 1996, Ray embarked on his retrospective tour-plus-album project The Storyteller and released two solo albums of new material. Unsurprisingly, 2006's Other People's Lives and the new Working Man's CafĂ© could very well have been Kinks albums—in fact, they would have made the best Kinks releases since the early '80s. Since the name Ray Davies is synonymous with The Kinks, he's dabbled very little in solo work in the past—although his appearance in the 1986 musical Absolute Beginners resulted in "Quiet Life," one of the best songs of his latter-day career. [The clip below has two minutes of dialogue before the song kicks in. It's worth the wait.]
The music of The Kinks has always had a strong cinematic feel—which is probably why so many young filmmakers have recently begun using it prominently in their soundtracks. 2007 alone saw three high-profile indie films—Hot Fuzz, The Darjeeling Limited, and Juno—featuring vintage Ray Davies compositions such as "Village Green," "Powerman," "This Time Tomorrow," and Dave's heart-stopping "Strangers." Darjeeling writer-director Wes Anderson is the one person most responsible for this Kinks big-screen renaissance; his use of the band's formerly little-known album track "Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" turned heads in his 1998 breakthrough Rushmore.
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