The Kronikles of the Day

The news was terrible lately. 

There’s too much negativity. 

I came across this article on the Kinks and the must-listen albums and thought this will be a welcome change. 

For the most of America, the Kinks are “You Really Got Me” and the way-overplayed- “Lola.”

That’s a shame. Their albums are quite a mix. The early years were a mix of rock songs, ballads, and mid-tempo 1960s. I really think that The Who wanted to be the Kinks when they started. The Kinks could be loud and they could do pop. The Who never got the pop right. The Kinks were also THE band at the time. 

Then The Kinks expanded their sound to include British dancehall songs, rock, folk and pop. They did these genres in the same album.

The Kinks go into the 1970s with Powerman and Lola. They still did a multitude of genres per album. Whereas The Beatles White Album was a multi-genre album and it’s a mess. A mess,of good songs, but it’s inconsistent. I can sit there and go that is a Paul song or that is a John song. It feels like they weren’t in the studio together. Worse was that they were in the studio together. The album is that disjointed. 

Fleetwood Mac’s 1980s albums were a mix of multiple writers and it shows. 

Somehow the Kinks make the transitions work and those albums work. In the late 1970s when every rocker dipped into disco, The Kinks do “Poseur” and “Punk Rocker” in an album. Ok “Paranoia” does rip from their own songs, but I love it.

The Kinks may be too British for American ears and they weren’t as big here as they should’ve been. They were too varied to be on super generic radio. Today we can create our own play list and you could pull songs from every era and probably not notice that these songs came from different eras. I would say this is a band to check out all of the day and all of the night some time.