Send "The Kinks " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 So what do you hear when you're listening to The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society? Usually when people discuss this record, particularly in the English media, they do so with a kind of misty-eyed nostalgia, treating the record as a loving tribute to the pastures and cottages of the England of years gone by. They hear admiration, even tenderness.You know what I hear? Spite. By 1968 it was clear that The Kinks would never truly experience success in America, success they apparently craved as much as anything. They'd been shafted by The American Federation of Musicians, who unfairly denied them a license to perform live in the country at the height of the British invasion. It was their big shot and they weren't even given the chance to blow it on their own terms - as a result the perfectly fine single "Days", released the same year as this album, never even charted on US shores. They were credited as influences by The Rolling Stone and The Who, they were stars in their home country, they were keeping admirable pace with The Beatles as far as great singles went, and yet at the time, they weren't even on the same radar in the eyes of the most lucrative of markets. Ray Davies probably feared, quite reasonably, that his band had missed their chance to be remembered in the right way, alongside all the biggest and best bands of the time. Wouldn't YOU be pissed off?...full text |
| Rollingstone |
| I certainly love the Kinks; it's been fifteen months since I've had a new Kinks album in my house, and though I've been listening to them I've missed that pleasure. Bob played The Village Green Preservation Society for me when he bought a British copy, about a month ago, and I've played it twice since it arrived here this afternoon, and already the songs are slipping into my mind, each new hearing is a combined joy of renewal and discovery. Such a joy, to make new friends! And each and every song Ray Davies has written is a different friend to me. Ray makes statements, he says the sort of stuff that makes you delighted just to know that someone would say stuff like that. "As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset I won't feel afraid." "I'll remember everything you said to me." "There's too much on my mind, and I can't sleep at night thinking about it." "There's a crack up in the ceiling." "I'm not content to be with you in the daytime." "The world keeps going 'round." "I'm on an island." "You just can't stop it, the world keeps going 'round." Oh, wonderful Kinks. They remind me of Erik Satie. "We are the Village Green Preservation Society." The vocal is under-recorded, so you turn up the volume. The bass and drums sound so easy and sure. Everyone's determined; no one's in a hurry. "What more can we do?" Such very fine vocals. The tune, the rhythm, are more of a delight with each verse. Dave Davies' lead lines are never wasted. It would be unbearable that the song's over, but here's another. "Walter, isn't it a shame our little world has changed?" Now why is it Ray's songs always sound like something else, a different something else with each song and sometimes with each hearing? Sure, he's the world's master plagiarist, but it's more than that. It's more a feeling that it's all part of the same thing, it's all music and isn't it nice to run a cross this melody again? And it is, it's never a repetition, it's always some sort of opening. Ray Davies makes you realize how much there is all around us, waiting to be explored and explored again. Boredom? Every place you've been is a new frontier, now that you're someone different....full text |
| Bbc |
| In 1968 The Kinks released The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, an album curiously closer in spirit to that year's new sitcom hit, Dad's Army, than to the more familiar rock 'n' roll preoccupations of the day. While his contemporaries were revolting in style or getting mystic, Ray Davies spent much of the summer putting together a concept album steeped in nostalgia for an 'Olde England' of corner shops, custard pies and steam trains; an album which seemed to draw as much on the prewar music-hall of Max Miller as it did the blues. While the rock mainstream embraced Satanism and free love, Davies sang about preserving virginity and Sunday School. The Kinks' latest heroes were, apparently, Desperate Dan and Mrs Mopp, rather than Abraham, Martin or John. It was seriously out of step with prevailing trends. And it wasn't only the subject matter: with hard-rock bands like Led Zeppelin poised on the horizon, it simply sounded too whimsical. Its potential success was not helped by the injunction which prevented The Kinks from touring the US between 1965 and 1969, essentially isolating them from rock's biggest market. Despite their position as one of the founding-fathers of mid-Sixties British pop/rock, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society flopped big-time. But over the years, it has undergone something of a reassessment. For manyit's now justly considered Davies' most satisfying album: a creative highpoint matched only by the band's landmark singles of the period. Only Davies would care that Britain's last main-line steam train finally reached the buffers that year and write an instant retro song like ''Last of the Steam-Powered Trains'', a sort of British Rail ''Smokestack Lightnin'''. Only Davies would bother to think about why people take photographs of each other ('To prove that they really existed', of course!) and write ''People Take Pictures''. But it's not all wistfully genteel: the childlike ''Phenomenal Cat'' is a nod towards psychedelia and there are some sterling Dave Davies riffs in ''Wicked Arabella'' and ''Johnny Thunder''. It's as English as billiards, but with more balls....full text |
The Kinks lyrics
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