The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

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

  1. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    I can’t recall hearing them on latter-day ‘77 FM radio, either.
     
  2. palisantrancho

    palisantrancho Forum Resident

    Personally, I do not hear much punk on Low Budget. I wish I did. It has few hints of it, but still far from it. I also don't hear it on Some Girls, other than maybe "Shattered". 70s punk and post punk are a couple of my favorite genres. My love even extends onward into 80s hardcore. I would say “Father Christmas” is the closest The Kinks got to punk during the late 70s. I guess I always expected Low Budget to be much more punk based on the album cover and its reputation.
    For awhile, it was a contender for my least favorite Kinks album. I no longer feel that way. It has climbed the ranks a bit in the last year or so, but some of it still annoys me. I’ll save my thoughts for what is sure to be an interesting discussion. I also have never been able to get into One For The Road. I would probably feel different if that was my intro into the band. I'll save giving that another chance until we get closer. As of today, all the remaining albums only have a few songs each that I care for. Some a few more than others, but I'm pretty sure that number will go up with closer inspection, and especially since many fans here seem to have lots of love for these records.
    I like this run down. I would only move Schoolboys to the Ray Davies Revue. I still think it has more in common with those albums than Sleepwalker/Misfits.
     
  3. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    Me too. Pretty Vacant was the catchy one. “We’re so pretty, we’re so pretty …”
     
  4. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Same....

    Punk didn't seem to have much of an effect in Aus.... with Acdc, Rose Tattoo, The Angels, Chisel etc, it wasn't like Aussie music had gone soft and needed waking up :)
     
  5. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    It's interesting how people hear things differently. I hear a notable shift in sound from Lola/Percy to Muswell, both in instrumentation and songwriting style. I would not group those albums together. Muswell is definitely the start of a new period, and to my ears sonically has much more in common with the Preservation albums.

    Reading all the comments about Sleepwalker being too slick and sounding like Kansas or Toto is interesting too. It is slickly produced, but to me it sounds like the Kinks. Someone commented earlier about how RCA signed the Kinks based on the Lola album, and the band proceeded to dramatically change their sound into something completely different, which no doubt was a huge disappointment to RCA. To my ears, Sleepwalker sounds like the return of the band who made Lola. Yeah, it's slicker, but it sounds more like Lola Vs PM in terms of instrumentation and songwriting approach than any of the intervening albums.
     
  6. palisantrancho

    palisantrancho Forum Resident

    Australia had a very early punk band with The Saints, who were fantastic. I highly recommend their first two album- (I'm) Stranded and Eternally Yours.
     
  7. All Down The Line

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

    Location:
    Australia
    So infamous they attempted a humerous Aussie Rules advert 20 odd years later with the same (she was clothed) lady in modern times!
     
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  8. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    Agreed. Those 1976-78 albums with EdKuepper are full on. The Saints came from my hometown, Brisbane. Long-haired punks? They didn’t fit into the punk image invented by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and embraced by the music press.
    That image premium would have frustrated musicians like Pete Townhend and Ray Davies. They were playing this stuff when the Sex Pistols were in kindergarten but were being dismissed as ‘boring old farts’.
     
  9. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Yea, The Saints and Radio Birdman were somewhat Aussie punks, but they fit in the landscape of Aussie pub rock perfectly. To the point where when Acdc really started taking off there was some sort of backlash against them, that they were in fact a punk band, and to this day, there will always be a plethora of police at Acdc concerts
     
  10. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Yea definitely... and it is always nice when the home team band gets some kudos.

    Ed Kuepper came up earlier on, and just because I love it, here he is again

     
  11. markelis

    markelis Forum Resident

    Location:
    Miami Beach FL
    Sleepwalker and the Arista era:

    Born in 65, I first got into the kinks in the mid 70s by hearing the greatest hits album covering their mid 60s hits like You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night as well as the Kinks Kronikles double album compilation. My grandmother had these albums and although I loved them, I never explored any other kinks albums.

    That is until Misfits came out in 1978. I was 13 and just beginning to explore music outside of the music I had learned about from my grandmother, and I had a paper route so I had discretionary income! I heard Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy on the radio, liked it and realized it was the kinks so I rode my bike the 7 or 8 miles to the local record store, Record Breaker, and bought Misfits (on the same day I also bought goats head soup). A few months later I heard Jukebox Music on the radio and went back to the record store in search of Sleepwalker.

    Those two albums made me a much bigger fan than I already was. Not big enough to explore backwards into the RCA era though. I don’t know if it was their rep has bad records, knowing that they were theatrical in nature, the album covers or the fact that I didn’t really recognize any of the songs on any of the albums but I never went there.

    Where I did go though, was to the front of the line to wait for the next few releases. I was there on release day for Low Budget, One from the Road and Give the People What They Want, and although somehow not quite as excited, probably for State of Confusion as well.

    I thought and still think that the run of albums from Sleepwalker through GTPWTW was incredibly strong. They may not have sounded the same as YRGM and Lola, the Kinks I first grew up on, but these were my own discoveries that I was later able to share with my grandmother and I loved them equally to the old stuff (…and FYI, so did she). To me, songs like Live Life, Jukebox Music and Sleepwalker kick just as much @$$ as YRGM and Til the End of the Day. I am looking forward to addressing these releases.
     
  12. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Long haired punks - like Joey Ramone, for example! There were a lot of people involved in punk who didn't have the cliched 'punk' image. The image and sound became fossilized later on.
     
  13. Smiler

    Smiler Forum Resident

    Location:
    Houston TX
    You must have had a very cool grandmother!
     
  14. Endicott

    Endicott Forum Resident

    I think what many hardcore Kinks fans miss about the Arista era is that the band's sense of adventure receded heavily at that point. The albums aren't bad, as a whole (some are a bit better than that), but there's hardly anything in them as bold as "See My Friends", as gloriously inane as "Ducks On The Wall", as ambitious as the Muswell Hillbillies album. We're not really getting any big surprises anymore. The Kinks basically are staying within the parameters of the standard late-seventies rock-band sound, sometimes very effectively, sometimes not. But it's all good; once you accept the Kinks' Arista period on its own terms, the band's material is still plenty satisfying. And I think this part of the tread will help most of us get there, as we go over these songs. I'm much looking forward to it.

    I guess the best comparison to the late-seventies Kinks is Santana. They had their own distinctive style and niche for several years, and were very successful with it for awhile. They then streamlined their sound to a more FM-friendly approach, which gave them renewed airplay in the process. But I think that the Kinks managed that transition much better than Santana did; I'm sure Inner Secrets and Marathon still have their admirers today, but I doubt they approach Sleepwalker's fans in numbers.
     
  15. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Well analyzed. Stuff I might think but could never (ever) put into words.:righton:
     
  16. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Additionally, they had just put out a song like The Hard Way which seems to be bugle call to start off the Punk Races.
     
  17. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    I agree with nearly all you had to say. The only thing I disagree with is the value of the live part of the Showbiz album. Even though they never should have combined a studio album with a live album as it's just "too much", I think the live album makes many of the MH songs come alive...to go more rock n roll rather than...whatever you'd want to call the studio versions: Americana, folk...fill in the blank. However, I do agree with you on the MH album. Damn, I so wanted to lose my mind over it, but I just couldn't get there. I would have never guess that I'd love Soap Opera more than MH. I mean, that's crazy!
     
  18. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Perish the thought!!

    :eek:
     
  19. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Don't stress... I can't hear Billy Joel, and I have a lot of his albums, so I would :eek: lol
     
  20. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    well said!
     
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  21. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Other than the Pistols being shown on TV as an object of shock or scorn, the Pistols were never played on commercial radio. It wasn't until the 80s that I first heard them.
     
  22. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Your GRANDMOTHER liked the Kinks and you're the same age as me? I can't even conceive of that. My parents were very young when they had me and I'm sure they do not know more than a few songs by the Kinks(maybe). Go grandma!
     
  23. DISKOJOE

    DISKOJOE Boredom That You Can Afford!

    Location:
    Salem, MA
    I think that WBCN may have played them although I don't have any memories of hearing them there. The first time I heard the Pistols was in high school. Somebody brought in the record and we listened to it on one of those crappy AV Department record players which made it sound pretty tinny.
     
  24. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    ha! Maybe WBCN played the Pistols here and there. I could not say. But it certainly was not on wide rotation like so many of the Kinks songs.

    [a bit of personal trivia: my husband and I met at a club in Boston in the early 90s. the first song we danced to together was Anarchy in the UK. How romantic. :love::laugh:]
     
  25. DISKOJOE

    DISKOJOE Boredom That You Can Afford!

    Location:
    Salem, MA
    Did you guys pogo or slam dance? :laugh:
     

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