PiL's METAL BOX @ 45

The first track is called Albatross. Bass notes as thick as any dub track pulse and are joined by a solid drum pattern peppered with snare fills. High guitar squeaks and noodles sound constant and discordant. Lydon comes in on one side of the stereo image, subdued, singing fragments of a limited range melody. The lines are about albatrosses and an unbearable second person, sowing seeds of discontent, running away and killing the spirit of '68. This was an improv track concocted in the studio but the lines suggest unfinished business with the self-proclaimed manipulator of The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren. The stabs on the first album were clearly not sufficient. The bird is the bringer of ill-fortune from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner whose narrator roams the earth, repeating his story of woe. The situationist students of the May '68 revolt in Paris provided McClaren with more non-comic stan-up material than Lydon found digestible. Sure, this ten minute long dirge might well have been off the cuff but Lydon was never shy of opining and if it fit then it was chosen. As significant is the same kind of outsize grind on an idee fixe might remind us of Theme that opened the first album but this time it is not an onslaught but quiet and relentless, clear to the point of being spacey. The lines float back past our ears the thoughts that stop us from sleeping, murmurs of worry.

Memories picks up the pace with wobbly flanged guitar and Lydon's voice in a more familiar reedy whine. This suddenly changes as thought someone  opened the mix's window. Repeat. Lydon's vocal takes on a kind of unschooled Islamic call to prayer. Lines of doubt and self accusation continue as the mix goes in and out of definition and the squealy electric Flamenco figure warbles onward. Swan Lake had been released as the single Death Disco. The drum pattern is authentically late '70s disco. Lydon wails about his helplessness to cope with his mother's drawn out death. Levene plays figures around the Tchaikovsky ballet theme as the vocal rises to a tireless scream and ghostly wails appear in the distance. The fade has a strange effect in that what sounds like a looped sample of synthesised strings starts at a loud note before toning down, out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Want to suggest something that's out of your control? Make it cross your rhythm patterns whenever it wants to.

Poptones is my favourite track on the album. It starts mid-phrase as the bass and drums provide a bedrock and the guitar plays increasingly hypnotic arpeggiated chords high on the fretboard. Lydon uses his attacking voice  to narrate a story from the news about a woman suffering assault after being driven to the country. The detail the victim recalled clearly was that the radio was playing what she described as poptones. Lydon's lyrics are fragmented but build a picture of chilling violence while the music keeps flowing, the guitar figure adds an eerie beauty to the atrocity. Careering has Levene on the synth instead of a guitar and he plays dissonant horror movie chords as Lydon's lyric tells of a gunman in Northern Ireland who lives as a suited city worker in London. A rugged bass and drums punch courses beneath the horrifying juxtaposition. "A face is raining across the border..."

No Birds takes its title from Keats's eerie poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci in which a knight is tempted by a supernatural beauty only to find himself enveloped in evil. Here the effect is transposed to what looks like suburbia. "This could be heaven, shallow spreads of ordered lawns..." But the more he describes it the more plainly static and breathless it appears. Graveyard begins, giving us the same dub groove with spiky guitar that speaks for the album in general But this time it's an instrumental. Levene's shining discords dance above the bedrock like bratty ghosts.

The Suit adds to a short bass figure repeated throughout, a series of snide taunts at conformity to a conventional life where if it's consumable it's good and vice versa. Lydon's vocal is more of a chant, the outsider kid smirking at the playground games and powerplays with observations that rise and fall through his cigarette smoke. Bad Baby pits a fractured drum pattern against an energetic bass groove and Levene's piercing horror synths as Lydon in a creepy high voice mixes the every day in the housing estate with the harrowing image of a baby abandoned in a car park. Everyone who sees it tells themself to ignore it until it vanishes. 

Socialist is an upbeat workout of beeping synthesisers with a bass groove. Chant begins with ragged guitar and a downmixed chanting of words love, war, fear, hate. Lydon's vocal snakes above it, distorted sneer. "It's not important. It's not worth a mention in the Guardian."  And then he repeats the word chant under the screaming guitar wash. After that study in sour, Radio 4's big warm synth strings wash feels almost sarcastic. Is this what you wanted after all that, it seems to ask. No drums but the bass is busy beneath, spodging around. It sounds improvised and left as is. And guess what, it's really lovely.

Unless you bought the later double vinyl Second Edition release, the bustling uniformity might be hard to take. Designer Dennis Morris' packaging was intended as a taunt to user friendly pop music delivery. The album was released as three twelve inch forty-fives which were stuffed tightly into a metal container that resembled a cine film cannister. The cans were hard to open and the discs were hard to get out without damage. Worse still, the metal used for the case was intended to rust and deteriorate over time and did. Propaganda by deed? Well, I never saw an original copy but I remember how funny I found the idea. The punk wars had failed but in the wake a new critical music was emerging with intent to disrupt and challenge, sometimes with a gleaming smile and sometimes with a guttural curse. Metal Box dissed its own market with this beautiful monstrosity. I wonder if anyone in that fevered era thought to keep their copy safe from its own intended doom?

When the conventional gatefold album came out and followed on from the debut with the title Second Edition, more people heard the music and experienced the one-song band from before was actually making music you could get into. It was a different deal to have to change the disc over and then the disc itself to hear the whole thing and then just to change four times. That strikes me as being a more benign measure. Take it in smaller doses, make each side special enough to go through those (mostly) two songs and think about them. My CD (yes, with a mini metal box which, yes, is rusting) presents everything in one long string and anyone who heard it first like this (I had it on a C-90 cassette, at first) will have come away exhausted. The smaller doses work a lot better. As I listened for this blog I began to split up the old side listings separately. That's when this record makes sense.

Metal Box is often given the accolade of being the apex of post punk. I don't find lists of cultural artefacts that interesting but I don't know if I'd agree, entirely. The anti-consumerist paradox of the packaging is gloriously of its time and the music is a strong consolidation of the tatters of the debut album. However, when you move beyond the purity of the concept, it's the album that it should have been. The big spacey concerns of Albatross tell us that we're in for something more seriously crafted and that is what we get.

Lydon has clearly moved on even as far as to put himself to one side of the stereo field or low in the mix to accommodate the overall project. Keith Levene joined the spiky discord brigade of difficult guitarists like The Banshees' John McKay and Gang of Four's Andy Gill in fashioning a post-rock sound that begged for development after its first few forays. This album of many drummers benefits from diversity and also from Jah Wobble's grounding bass work. It is a great work but to elevate it above a field of similarly great works misses the point, the assured and cool anonymity of it that graced the best of music for about five bristlingly rich years of musical exploration. Yes, it all got swallowed into the big mainstream whale but for that time when you could be scary without pretending you were a vampire, classical without faux-poshness, and music first without the music press, things changed enough to carry into the future and left plenty of archaeology for the curious listeners of nowdays. For the prickly contrarians who made this record, that's a pleasing feat that never has to sell out. 

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES' JOIN HANDS @ 45

The difficult in the term difficult second album usually refers to the problem of coming up with the quality of material in weeks that had taken a lifetime to make the first batch. I know too many counter examples of that to consider it anything but subjective. Closer, This Year's Model, Plastic Letters, Reckoning, A Quick One all shape up as impressive platters bursting with creative energy. The Banshees second go was difficult in other ways. First, it's a lot spikier and less user-friendly than The Scream. Second, it is the abrupt end of Banshees Mark 1. Whatever they went on to, they would never sound like this again.

Poppy Day starts a loud bright bell. Then a guitar rasps high on the fretboard from a cloud of distortion. The drums enter, sounding like a Joy Division song. When Siouxsie enters, she's low in the mix and wailing at the top of her voice.  The lyric is a call from the graves of soldiers who fell at Flanders. Buying a poppy is meant to remind us of heroism but this is more like a cry from a zombie movie. At two minutes, it won't test your attention span and its brevity through the harshness of the execution brings an extra layer of eeriness. It's an indication that the darker sides of The Scream are about to crawl up out of the earth an dominate this one. And that's what happens.

Regal Zone carries the war history theme, the title referring to the unaffected state of warmongering monarchs who can gaze out upon the carnage with impunity. Even the site of a sculpted soldier depicted in mid writhe before death leaves their bright portraits untouched. The guitar, again distorted through effects, punches at the air while the band plough through an unusual beat and a rasping saxophone plays above. Siouxsie's wail is mixed higher but is making melodic shapes as much as singing lyrics. A cry of outraged description as much as vindication.

Placebo Effect could have been written much more recently with its references to alternative medicine and characterising it as a mass of bullshit. A strange guitar effect similar to the one in Wire's I am the Fly starts with an insistent chord riff. Siouxsie begins closer to her speaking voice about dodgy alt.medicine procedures as McKay's guitar settles into the slashing style of the first album with more conventional reinforcement in lower octaves. Siouxsie wails above the grind and swirl to the repetition of the title until the guitar returns to its abrasive opening figure. A proto stab at a voodoo doll of future mass conjobs. Pretty impressive for a band later considered the mothership of goth.

After the triple bash of the opening songs Icon slows things down for its introduction of quietly menacing muted chords playing under sighing ride cymbals. Siouxsie comes in with a confessional tone and the surreal observation of her eyes lifting or falling in the sky, religious lies or diversions. And then there is the initial calm refrain of the chorus: "Icons feed the fires, icons falling from the spires." And then the pace picks up as McKay's pealing guitar plays the chord progression in a dirty jingle as Siouxsie raises her voice to a wail for the first full verse: "Those words hang like vicious spittle dribbling from the tongue. Close your eyes to your lies force feed more pious meat." The language turns abstract but the voice beseeches. Steve Severin, author of this one, has said it was inspired by middle eastern religious figures that danced themselves into frenzies that allowed them to withstand pain and proved it with physical tests (the lines about skewers apply here) but he took it further to ponder religious fervour and its motivations. The song is a marvel of suspension, stretching a bright, modal harmonic pattern beneath a vocal that travels and then soars. When the middle eight arrives, calling ecstatically for the guilt to be golden, and Siouxsie's lung-testing elongated notes, the celebration of the music and the horrors of the words, creepily, weave instead of disrupting each other. The closing din of Siouxsie's wail and McKay's slicing chord frenzy bring things to an abrupt end. I always feel like putting it on again but I always know better.

Premature Burial begins with volume swells on the guitar, a series of two chords repeating, until the band comes in with a thudding grind. Siouxsie's voice comes in at full strength, describing the condition of the title (lifted from an Edgar Allen Poe story) as her character tries to claw her way out of her coffin and back into the world, aided by chanting that might as easily be voodoo or Christian. She supplies her own backing vocals in the form of wordless rises and falls beneath her lead lines. The song grumbles forward like a tank, aggravated until the lines about sisters and brothers are augmented by a hellish baritone choir and the usual tom-heavy drumming until the grey skinned progression retreats back to the volume swells into the distance. In the same way that Bauhaus' later Bela Lugosi's Dead did, The Banshees push this into a pisstake ("oh what a bloody shame") but it's one that never quite erases the big doomy power of the bed track.

Side two starts with the phlanging rush of McKay's guitar sounding more machine like as it runs from the minor tonic to the fifth, supported by the bass, drums and bells in a big proto goth wash that is called Playground Twist. As the lines mix images of childhood play and grownups loping around drunk at parties there is a strange swinging vertigo to the number, aided by its 3/4 time and relentless metallic rush. A melodic but dizzy sax solo mixes it up even more. "You can drown when you're shallow, you can drown, drown droooooooowen, drooooooowen.!" 

If Playground Twist took us to kitchen sink horror movies Mother/Oh Mein Papa lures us into a dark house filled with familial severity and abuse. A musical box plays the old standard Oh Mein Papa as it winds down Siouxsie sings on one side of the stereo about how she longs to please her mother who watches over her and on the other side how oppressive her mother's disapproval and authority suffocates her.  A final visit to the English lyrics of the original, sung feckless, exhausted. The spring winds down and the energy drains with the final chime.

The Lord's Prayer is a kind of tribute to the band's origins. When Siouxsie and various Bromley Contingent cronies mounted their first stage with Sid Vicious on drums and future Ant Marco Pironi, they made a lot of barre chord din while Siouxsie wailed the words to the Lord's Prayer and anything else she could think of until it ended somehow. That's what we get here for the last half of side one; grinding punk with growling chords, thudding bass and toms with Siouxsie caterwauling overhead. The sole qualification this track has for the status of epic is it's fourteen minute plus length. While it's not as one-and-done as PiL's Fodderstompf, it does test its listeners. While it's frequently funny ("you'll never - get - to heaven ... not even if you're good!") and this lineup of the band can play its way into listenability with little effort. Here, only two years after that first performance, it does outstay its welcome like someone who repeats a joke rather than stay quiet or willingly retreat into the crowd. Well, I bet the first time was a blast.

But we come to the other meaning of the difficult second album: after this one, the band changed. Kenny Morris and John McKay fled the band in the middle of a tour after a botched gesture at an in-store promo disgusted them (the management had run out of copies of this LP and were mistakenly selling promo copies to fans). There is no coming back from desertion when a young band in that culture needed to be tight knit. Then, however mistaken the reason (which they admitted much later) there is no cleaning up sell-out corruption. At that point, the band that had formed from pub-going mates and had a bash on stage once but honed their craft to the extent that they were effortlessly the equivalent of the likes of PiL or The Clash, were never to be more.

To their credit, when Siouxsie and fellow remain-er Steve Severin decided to carry on at any cost, they did so with an eye to how this came about and a path of committed exploration. They found a whizbang drummer in Budgie but changed their guitarists every album or so and recooked their sound around its persistent marks (mainly Siouxsie's voice) and gave the world of goth to come an origin story. So, yes, for two solid records, a band with a sabre like approach to forging forward with great integrity accepted a challenge to a reinvention by necessity that gave them a far longer life than their titanic contemporaries. Me, I like almost all of it (and The Creatures afterwards) but if I didn't, I'd still have the first brace of discs that ends with the yell, "this prayer goes on and on!" and a final dissipating stutter of guitar distortion. That's how it happens. 

UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

I didn't have this LP in 1979. The only Joy Division record I owned until 1984 was the Love Will Tear Us Apart seven inch. As for the band, I laughed at them but this was really about their fans, the people who would tell you at parties after midnight that you could hear Ian Curtis' epilepsy in his vocals. They seemed like a hobbyist death cult. Still, the name and the album title and the black leather look cardstock of the cover and the white inner sleeve blended strangely with the gloom and force of the music and I pushed them away because I feared what would happen if I didn't.

If I recall this album rather than play it, I think of it as samey, track after track of gloomy slow guitar rock. It takes a listen to remind me of the varying textures and moods and that the songs are quite distinct from each other. I think that's the artwork. Black, leathery cardstock with a small spiky diagram and a white inner sleeve with a creepy negative photo of a hand at a door on one side. Even the label was enigmatic: both sides repeat the cover image but one is white on black and the other is black on white and they aren't just sides one and two but outside and inside. If there is something being communicated it isn't being open about it. It was as though it had beamed in from another dimension.

In 1979, when cover art was still a matter of brash punky images against the airbrushed mainstream, this was edgy. A band that had emerged from the punk scene and considered itself a punk outfit was hitting the record shops with mystique. Had we not fought in the punk wars to rid the world of such Hipgnosis blare? If you're going to go around in a T-shirt that says I hate Pink Floyd, you should probably avoid the enigmatic on the old record sleeves. 

The problem is that Peter Saville's cover design for this record says everything visual about this record that you need to know before you've heard a note. The cow on Atom Heart Mother might well have been an inspiration of opportunity that worked because that's what was put there. The Unknown Pleasures cover looked like manual for something you didn't want to know about. It was forbidding. No rock album cover since Never Mind the Bollocks served the music on the disc more aptly than this one.

And the music? The band had already had a stab at some of these tracks and had produced an EP. These sides, for all their promise, were raw and recognisably punky. In a series of now famous decisions, producer Martin Hannett effectively future proofed the songs, taking them from overdrive and vocal snarl to a kind of cinema.

Disorder starts with palpitating drums and a picked loping bassline before the two-note pattern guitar comes in like a siren before the vocals begin talking about looking for a guide to help him cope with normal life. He has the spirit less the feeling but needs the feeling. This is one that can easily be imagined as an outright punk attack. Here it is more mildly paced and spacey. The voice that builds from a mumble to a cry (as it does in many of these songs) is in the centre set in warm reverb.

Day of the Lords cranks things down to glacial pacing. A guitar and bass figure rise menacingly through the minor scale before crashing deep and dark, the bass finishes the full figure with what at first sounds like major third to tonic but falls back down to the shadows around the minor. Curtis is central and darker with lines about a room and associated images of atrocities, warfare, torture and deadly competition before asking where it will end as a shrieking synthesiser calls out and floats above. The final verse is an octave up and repeats the opening verse ending with the question, "where will it end?" in a scream. This grinding atmosphere of nights of crime against humanity is what many people who have heard Joy Division think of when they hear the band name, a sound that couldn't be reasoned with and preferred skulking in the dark at the party.

Candidate comes slowly out of the shadows with a reverby drum pattern, slow and splashy. It's joine by a bass with a modal figure. Curtis comes in strongly but also heavily reverbed, the guitar making distant and barely tonal punctuation points around it, squeals, croons, metallic processes. "Forced by the pressure, the territory's marred, not longer the pleasure, I've since lost the heart..." Whatever the relationship was it is now beyond negotiation. The end, as the warped guitar wanders around in the dark like a stumbling ghost, is a repeat of the plea, "I tried to get to you."

Insight begins with what sounds like someone getting punched in the guts by a car door before a ride cymbal intro gives way to another descending bass line. Curtis' voice is phased or phlanged. A lyric of disappointment at one's own youth. A middle section sounds like a blast of video game laser effects before a calm return to the verse. This ends with the repeated claim, "I'm not afraid anymore," as the track closes with another burst of laser fighting.

New Dawn Fades is one of the band's most celebrated and covered songs. It's also one of their most forbidding being a statement of defeat. Spacey drums and a descending bass line lead to a big present guitar line that moves upward before finding its place in one of Bernard Sumner's signature two-note patterns. Curtis comes in as the guitar changes to a spooky but pretty arpeggio down the scale. He sounds full voiced but exhausted. After a brief instrumental respite playing through the progression twice the vocal returns an octave higher but more angry and desperate than anything else on the side. By the time he wails about them waiting for him in futility, Bernard is playing his own two-note figure higher on the fretboard and returns to a much higher iteration of the opening growling scale before he leaves it to the bass s it rushes to capitulation and the last few bars of the drums. End of side one.

She's Lost Control starts as a drum pattern that seems to start halfway through before one of the band's most famous bass riffs comes in with a crooning tone. Curtis' vocals are anything but crooning, describing a woman having a seizure but she's not just helplessly flailing on the floor. The source point for this song was something that Curtis saw in real life. He had epilepsy himself but the horrors he's describing here are not just about a medical condition but a general force that the woman in the song finds is wrenching her away from life into an inner chaos. She talks to the song's narrator, explains and corrects him. Whatever he witnessed on that occasion took him to further imagined states. To leave it at the seizure undercuts the lyricist's creativity (which is where those first gen JD fans used to leave me cold). The guitar doesn't appear in the arrangement until the end of the first verse when it clanks up through the minor scale. When the bass re-enters with its cooing riff there is a clear sense that for the woman in the song, this thing accosting her feels like it's taking forever, just repeating when she allows it. "And walked upon the edge of no escape and laughed I've lost control."

There's a version recorded later which ended up on the b-side of the Atmosphere single. It's cold as hell and ends with a wall of searing keyboards. I never worked out why they re-recorded it like that. It's from the same session as an instrumental that feels like it continued or emerged from the older song so it might only have been that. There's a mumbled coda that's all but unintelligible. What interests me about it is that for all its stripped back emotion, it only sounds crueller than the Unknown Pleasures version which scrubs up a lot warmer, despite the nightmare of its situation.

Shadowplay is one of the older songs on the record. The version on the Warsaw album is punkier and has a higher pitched Curtis vocal. Here, Martin Hannett has tamed the snotty edge that made it sound like too many other hopefuls and gave it gravitas. When the band kicks in from the slashing ride cymbal and bass hook it's crunching rather than thudding and Curtis' vocal has more confidence and character. Assassins, secret rooms and more despair. Bernard's guitar rises to the end of the track, insisting on single notes played high before a final chord.

Wilderness begins with a gymnastic bass lope before settling into a guitar grind. The singer has travelled far and wide and reports what sound like religious atrocities. A high two-note guitar figure sounds white against a black background. The second verse calls out more misery.

Interzone. A snarling chord riff and a distant scream start this rocker with its call and response vocal. Peter Hook takes the first vocal and Curtis responds, often repeating the initial line. This is another of the songs that sounds like it would be at home as a punk number. Images of violence that might well exist in the title's source, William Burroughs setting for some of Naked Lunch. This was one of the songs the band wrote in the studio when some of the tracks were dropped form the album (another was Candidate) and was very vaguely based on Keith Hudson's Turn the Heater On. 

I Remember Nothing swells up as a formless electronic drone, blostered by a spacey drum pattern, big picked bass notes, more synth and a clicking muted guitar. Suddenly a shattering of glass. Curtis comes in already at ten with the main refrain: "Weeeeeeeee were strangers ... for way too long." Alienation, violence, gaps between people filled with frozen air. The outro continues the drone, spiking, thudding and clanking with more noises of slamming and crashing in a spacious reverb. A few final moments of violence as metal collides with walls and floors. End.

My 1984 had been enjoyable, the complete antithesis of homelife from my undergraduate years with my brother's bad marriage. While that circumstance was good for driving me into my studies and music it wasn't good to come home to. Then that ended and all but myself and another brother were left the next year. I was still able to spend a little money every dole cheque on records and books and Joy Division were among those catch up bands whose records I bought. 

I found this at Skinny's for about $2 and spent the next week living in it. Closer came soon after and then Still. I didn't become one of the uberfans that I'd ridiculed until a few years on and I still can't quite work out why that happened. But back in '85 when the fragments of the previous year's enjoyable lifestyle eventually blew away, I was left feeling flat and the big gloomy notion that that was all my life would be. After three years of ecstatic cultural blitzkrieg it was the path to the mainstream and colourless conformity. I was still writing short fiction and had some ambitions there but no one makes money out of that. In the gap between hanging on to the fun of the early eighties as the mid point was about to click over and absorbing into the Brisbane streetscapes and the revitalising move to Melbourne, Unknown Pleasures made a kind of sense to me. Not a self pitying wallow but a kind of recognisable cultural filter, something that told me I wasn't like the rank and file and could still get something expressive done. 

You give up on such things when you understand how your best efforts cannot match your ambitions. There's no shame in that but unless you have something to break your fall you're going to have a harder time of it. Unknown Pleasures was one of a number of records that gave me that break. Now, if I see the cover image on a T-shirt worn by someone too young to know what it means, I let it pass. And however absurd and self-embarrassing the more extreme fandom redrew them I forgive it all, knowing I once had the judgement to allow a couple of sides of music, a guide to take me by the hand, to keep me from a quiet surrender.

Listening notes: I took the bold and clean hi-res downloads from either Pro Studio Masters or HD-Tracks to guide this post. Utter bliss and not loudness-warred.

KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.