Kinks

The Kinks’s impact on the world of rock and roll music is incalculable, with artists from The Who’s Pete Townsend to The Killers citing the band, especially Ray Davies’s songwriting, as a massive influence. Their career was as prolific as it was enduring, from their early hits like “All Day and All of the Night” to the thoughtful, subtly satirical masterpiece The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and onward, into a successful period in the 80’s that was far more critically respected than similar periods by other classic rock bands of the 1960’s.

The Kinks legacy continues today. Davies is often credited as the grandfather of entire movements of music (Britpop, in particular, regards him fondly) and far more recently they have reached the charts again, due to the inclusion of the classic “A Well Respected Man” on the soundtrack of the hit film Juno.

The Kinks’s debut album, simply called Kinks, is a great insight into their beginnings and a fun album all in all. In many ways, it’s a typical 1960’s rock-band debut, but at the same time, you can hear the beginnings of something great. Perhaps most impressive is the number of original songs by Ray Davies in an era where most bands began, if not built, their career on blues covers.

The album has a fair number of the standard covers, from Chuck Berry’s raucous “Hey Delilah,” and “Too Much Monkey Business” to the hilariously cocky “Long Tall Shorty.” The recordings are fast, loose, and enthusiastic – fun, but fairly typical of the rock and roll records coming out of the UK at the time. It’s loose in a lot of ways, with the recording of the music deliberately unpolished as an affront to the clean-cut generation that came prior.

The whole album is fun, but it’s Davies’s early forays into songwriting that really show off the band’s diversity. “So Mystifying” has a Stones-esque riff and protracted vocals. “Just Can’t Go to Sleep” has brighter, clean-cut sounds more suited to the stage of American Bandstand. “Revenge” is a bawdy, harmonica-fueled blues instrumental, and “Stop Your Sobbing” is softer, reminiscent of the Motown covers being performed by their contemporaries.

Then there’s “You Really Got Me,” a key cut in rock history. Ragged vocals permeate the album, but when combined on this track with a fast-hitting guitar riff and Dave Davies’s slashed speakers, it creates its own sonic world, a world that became crucial in the eventual development of harder rock movements like punk and metal. In some ways, the song is aggressively ugly – at least it’s easy to hear how it would sound that way to parents at the time – but its infectious hook and groundbreaking sound cement it as one of the all-time classics in rock and roll history.

Kinks sounds at first like a typical record from the era, but the stylistic shifts, though subtle, are far-reaching for a band in this early stage of development. They hint at the future greatness the band would come to display, and make a record that is not only fun, but very diverse.