384. The Kinks, "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society"

 


Were the Kinks better than the Beatles?  Some people think so!  I do not want to get in the middle of a Boomer fight like that and get run over by someone's midlife crisis BMW Z4, but I will just say that this album is a good argument in favor.  Kicking off with the sort-of title track, this album goes all kinds of weird and great places.  The one you almost definitely probably know is "Picture Book," from that HP commercial back in the early '00s.  It's one of the hookiest songs of all time, with a guitar riff that arrived straight from heaven.  


Good luck not humming that all day.  But there's so much more!  "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains" is fascinating because it uses what, for all intents and purposes, is a sample, decades before "sampling" was a thing, in this case of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning."  I mean, they just picked up the riff, changed it ever so slightly, and brought it right into their train song.  "Johnny Thunder," a tale of a small-town tough, is so much more beautiful than it has any right to be.  

When this came out, sadly, on the same day as the Beatles' "White Album," I guess people just didn't know what to make of it.  Rock at that point was all about bombast and swagger, and here comes a carefully constructed set of songs about English pastoralism and small-town characters.  It sounds baroque and operatic in parts, but the really hooky and memorable kind.  It didn't sell very well, at least at first, and got lost in the Beatles/Stones/Hendrix shuffle of the time.  The Kinks also had a bunch of their own problems that precluded them from really capitalizing on their spectacular talent, and it was years before this album really got its due.  Now it's recognized as a classic and maybe even the Kinks' Sergeant Pepper or Pet Sounds, but truth be told, I'd rather listen to this over either of those.  All the way down here at 384!  Shameful.

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