The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by mark winstanley, Apr 4, 2021.

  1. Pawnmower

    Pawnmower Senior Member

    Location:
    Dearborn, MI
    Oh hey, I'm back! "Lola" is a great album filled with wonderful songs & some of my favorite moments in the Kinks catalog. OK, now on to "Percy." My only copy of this album is on disc 2 of the 2014 "Lola" deluxe edition.

    "God's Children" - My thoughts are the same as the others here. It's a gorgeous song hidden on a neglected soundtrack album. An instant singalong that speaks to many. In some ways it doesn't work as an album opener, but in other days it really does. I do often forget about this track, if I'm being honest. When I think of "Percy" I mainly think of "The Way Love Used to Be" and all the disappointing filler. We'll see what this re-evaluation does for me.

    "Lola (instrumental)" - My main issue with this is its length. It sounds good, but the drums are the most rocking part of it. I'm fine with it as an alternate take on the song. I wouldn't seek it out, but if I'm playing "Percy" I'm not skipping it (because I don't skip tracks).

    "The Way Love Used To Be" - Another wonderful song. I love the strings on this. I think it was a great idea to include this and "Time Song" in the VGPS box set as they fit the vibe of that album and it will hopefully give the track more exposure. The song is just really sweet. A nice sentiment and a gentle delivery. Unlike "Lola (instrumental)," I wish it were longer.
     
  2. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    It’s here I have to mention The Knickerbockers!

     
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  3. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Completely

    stereo mix (3:38), recorded 29 Sep 1970, mixed Nov 16-18, 1970 and Jan 1971 at Morgan Studios (1), Willesden, London

    Written by: Ray Davies
    Published by: Coronado Music

    Essentially this is a pretty straight blues jam, with some lead guitar, some organ and harmonica.
    I suppose there is nothing startling about it, but I particularly like the sections with the harmonized guitars. It’s just a sound that I love.

    Dalton and Avory just pulse along to the beat.
    The guitars open with that wonderful, harmonised lead section, then we move into a cool organ lead from Gosling, with I assume Ray honking on the harmonica in the background.

    Towards the end Dave rips off some nice lead guitar and the track ends hitting a beat that feels like they are about to go somewhere else with it, but we just stop.

    I guess there isn’t much to say about this track, but even though it isn’t setting the world on fire, I enjoy this kind of thing, and even though this is probably slightly longer than it needs to be, I’m in no hurry for it to finish.

     
  4. croquetlawns

    croquetlawns Forum Resident

    Location:
    Scotland
    Other than the organ in the middle section, I find this blues jam pretty boring and forgettable.
     
  5. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Running Round Town

    stereo mix (1:03), recorded 12 Oct 1970, mixed Nov 16-18, 1970 and Jan 1971 at Morgan Studios (1), Willesden, London

    Written by: Ray Davies
    Published by: Coronado Music

    This is a neat little instrumental that works as incidental music, and it kind of has a Willie and the Hand Jive sound about it at the start. It moves into a different feel, which gives the impression of intensity as we move around town.
    It builds up and we get some more harmonica. How long is it since we had harmonica on a Kinks album? It seems like quite a while.

    Then we move into a keyboard section that is essentially a rolling arpeggio. The keyboard dies off and we get an acoustic guitar with a bit of a chorus effect on it, and the track rolls out.

    This isn’t something I imagine anyone is going to rush to listen to alone, but again, for me it is a neat little track on the album, that does give the feeling of running around town and then the sigh of relief as we arrive back home, nice and comfortable to put our feet up and relax.

     
  6. croquetlawns

    croquetlawns Forum Resident

    Location:
    Scotland
    Much better!
     
  7. ARL

    ARL Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
    Not a lot to say about today's tracks:

    "Completely" - kind of reminds me of "Albatross" at the start with bits of the lead guitar melody. Then it goes on for far too long without going anywhere, which I suppose is fine for incidental music in a movie.

    "Running Round Town" - this one sounds as though it's about to get interesting, and then it ends!

    Tracks like these generally explain why I seldom pick out this album to listen to, and why I need to make an edited highlights disc.
     
  8. Fortuleo

    Fortuleo Used to be a Forum Resident

    I don’t find Completely completely without merits. The duetting guitars (is it Dave + Ray ??) is indeed a nice touch. The piece has a big dry rhythmic sound quite similar to Lennon’s It’s So Hard on Imagine, released six months later. Then again, It’s So Hard is by far the song I like the less on Imagine
     
  9. dwilpower

    dwilpower Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow Scotland
    I always liked the quirkiness of Kinks and really liked a lot of their hit singles. I was amazed to discover that they were more of a SINGLES band in the UK where they scored 19 top 50 hit singles in the early to mid 60's including 3 No1's. Their UK album sales are not so impressive. The Kinks first 5 original albums made the UK album charts between 1964 and 1967. The first two reached No3 followed by No9, No12, No 35. EVERY KINKS ORIGINAL ALBUM RELEASED AFTER 1968 HAS FAILED TO CHART. Their album success after 1968 resulting entirely from Greatest Hits compilations apart from a re-release of "Are The Village Green Preservation" which reached No47 in 2018. Chart statistics from the UK Official Charts Company Website.
     
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  10. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    Completely: A blues with the best part being the twin guitars.

    Running Round Town: reminds me of a track off of Mahoney’s Last Stand (Ron Wood/Ronnie Lane), also a movie soundtrack. This is the better of today’s two.
     
  11. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Completely.....

    .....incidental blues jam.

    Pleasant though if they had been on the Immediate Label and only roughly demoed it it still would have made one of their Blues Anytime Compilations.
     
  12. Fortuleo

    Fortuleo Used to be a Forum Resident

    Agreed with @Zeki's Mahoney call! This rhythm guitar intro of Running Round Town is also similar to (or influenced by) the Mrs Robinson’s instrumental cues at the end of The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman is desperate to get to the church, by car and then on foot (running…), before Katharine Ross’ wedding (aside note: isn’t it remarkable that the mother of all romantic comedies ends with a canceled wedding and a sense of unresolved stupor, whereas the hundreds of films and tv series it influenced all end with a happy wedding and all questions answered ?). Otherwise, we hear shades of Lola in the bass/piano hook (with some Apeman thrown in?) and a lovely little Dreams piano at the end. It’s a good film cue, but I’m glad we did it today, I was a bit concerned about its ability to sustain a whole day of discussion…
     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2021
  13. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    The whole scenario of the Kinks and their charting in the UK is bewildering to me.
    It is a perfect example, to me, of how charts have nothing to do with quality.
     
  14. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Running Round Town

    A fine, brief soundtrack interlude.
    The keyboard (harpsichord?) sounds baroque and for me is reminiscent of their 1966-'68 period feel.
     
  15. ajsmith

    ajsmith Senior Member

    Location:
    Glasgow
    (Slightly) Interesting that the instrumentals on this album are the first that The Kinks had released on record since ‘Revenge’ on the first LP. There were also 5 instrumentals recorded in the 1967-8 timeframe, though none were released at the time and at least one (and likely more) of them was intended to have lyrics.
     
  16. markelis

    markelis Forum Resident

    Location:
    Miami Beach FL
    George of course! My typo triggered a funny memory. In my youth, I used to work with a guy who used to refer to Led Zepplin as “he” or “him”. The “he” in question referred to Jimmy Page. It was this guy who, for the first time, and every time thereafter that YRGM would come on the radio, first told me the urban myth that Page played the solo. I am not sure what was funnier, the myth itself that he was perpetuating or the fact that he though Led Zepplin was the guitarist’s name. Silly person!
     
  17. dwilpower

    dwilpower Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow Scotland
    It's more about sales volume and timespan. It would be interesting to know the overall sales figures over a 30 yr period for those albums that never sold enough copies in any one week to chart compared to the bottom 10 albums of the first month of a Kinks specific non charting release. At that time the charts reflected sales peaks for a 7 day period from a small sample group of record retailers across the UK. The biggest retailers such as Woolworths were not included!
     
  18. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Accurate sales figures would be nice, but seem to be unlikely to ever occur.
    Probably more a topic for another thread, to some degree.

    As for the Kinks, the charting and sales of the albums in the UK seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of the albums. If I remember rightly, the debut was the highest charting album, and although I like it well enough, it isn't a patch on the albums that followed.
    I think the albums just got better and better, with a plateau of sorts from Something else through Lola, where the quality is consistently high, and most folks find a favourite between them, but they are all just very high quality albums.
    The bands singles seem to be where the majority of people reside, and the band was extremely successful with their singles, but at a certain point it seems the band fell out of favour with the UK buyers, and I don't understand why, because again, to me, the quality is still there....... but that's the weird world of music.
    From Lola onwards, the bands US popularity grew, from a charts and sales perspective, and that is weird and interesting to me also. I think it was somewhat partly the band having the ban lifted, and also the several little changes in direction that the band made, that was more in line with US consumer's tastes.
     
  19. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    Completely
    This sounds like a bit of filler for a scene in the movie. I was going to say it's unmemorable. But I was listening to both Preservation albums today (to identify the songs for the one great album it could have been) and Slum Kids is based on a very similar blues pattern to Completely, but played a little faster. So it's memorable in that it reminds me of another Kinks song!

    Running Round Town

    Great call. It's very similar to the two Ronnies :D
     
  20. markelis

    markelis Forum Resident

    Location:
    Miami Beach FL
    Completely/Running…: not a lot to say here. I like them both fine, I would not skip them. ….but they also don’t stand out enough for me to throw them on a playlist.
     
  21. Fischman

    Fischman RockMonster, ClassicalMaster, and JazzMeister

    Location:
    New Mexico
    My thoughts exactly.
     
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  22. DISKOJOE

    DISKOJOE Boredom That You Can Afford!

    Location:
    Salem, MA
    Nothing too profound to say about today's songs, unlike yesterday. One song is bluesy, the other poppy, both pleasant but neither will set the world on fire.

    Also, since it's kinda, sorta in the time frame, the latest issue of Record Collector to hit these shoes, erm, shores, has a small story about "Nobody's Fool" by Cold Turkey, which was the theme to the UK series Budgie and probably the last new Ray Davies song released by Pye Records:

     
  23. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Could this guy be taught Elvis?
     
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  24. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    I can see how this theme would meld into the opening scene. “I’m nobody’s fool and I’m nobody’s friend…” fade, Action!
     
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  25. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    (Insert Ronnie Barker Voice Here......)
    .....And tomorrow night we will be resuming with a man that's had a very personal transplant & a nurse that's trying to bring him back to rude health!
    And with that it's goodnight from me.
     

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