Reviews
Artist: The Kinks
Album: The Kinks/Kinda Kinks/The Kink Kontroversy
Label: Sanctuary
Tracks: 56/25/29(2CD)
Website:http://www.myspace.com/thekinksofficial
There's a lot of articles that have been written over the years about the rivalries between the Beatles and the Stones, Jagger and Richards vs. Lennon and McCartney, as with politics throwing around just two pairs of names really does everyone else and injustice, especially those that were always there or there abouts.
Let me throw the Kinks into the band mix and Ray Davies into the songwriting one. Fortunately I'd say both names are as household as both the Beatles and Stones and history means that I really don't have to prove my case as to achievement, top albums, singles, position in the British invasion of America, influence on subsequent generations of musicians, egos and rivalries etc.
So why bring it up ? Well quite simply because the first three albums from the golden age of the Kinks have just been given the star treatment and have all been released in deluxe form and that means extra tracks by the bucket load.
There really is something here for everyone devoted fan and casual acquaintance alike. As someone that really was too young to remember the band's heydays, heck for the first part of it I wasn't even born, it really has turned out to be an eye opener.
First and foremost, I've only ever heard best of compilations and unadulterated albums. Exciting though those albums are, they really don't deliver the context the way these deluxe compilations do, so first and foremost hats off to the team that put these compilations together.
Listening to the radio sessions and interviews helps really give these albums their place in history as opposed to just a year. By that you get a real sense of the excitement that was being generated by the releases and how much of a tangent the music industry was taking on a global scale, maybe for the first time since rock 'n' roll and the invention of the original teenager.
It's also a testament to the prolific nature of the time, the three albums given the treatment, "Kinks", "Kinda Kinks" and "The Kink Kontroversy" were all released during a two year period and that ignores all the tracks on these 2cd sets that never made a commercial release, at least not on a contemporary album or EP.
One of the reasons for that recognition is that the Kinks were one of the first bands to take full advantage of new recording techniques that were just coming to fruition, it meant that no one had really heard their sound before, it was genuinely difficult to compare the band to those that had gone before, even when playing the songs that had influenced them.
What really impresses me about these re-releases though is just how fresh these tracks sound. If you get all three albums you get 106 tracks in total. Having played my way through them there's barely a handful that don't cut the mustard, quite a hit rate.
Like many bands, the Kinks have had their greatest hits packages, stop pretty much anyone one in the street and they'll be able to name at least one Kinks song and in most cases more, there's not a lot of bands that that holds true for, play most of them a track from these deluxe additions and most people will probably be able to name the band if not the track, there's even less that holds true for.
For me though its releases like these that separate the wheat from the chaff, over forty years after their original release, these album are still capable of causing a stir.
Neil King