Ring the Bells tugs everything down with its acoustic guitar and laid back Ray vocal. It's a quiet celebration of being in love. Ray makes it sound like he woke up at half past three in the morning to reassure himself. The melancholy audible through the sentiment and the arrangement has already appeared on other Kinks records and it's gleaming the surface here.
Gotta Get the First Plane Home introduces a kind of playing Dave Davies would keep using throughout the '60s. It's a clunking staccato, just below amp breakup and palm muted, every note knocks at the next one. It's so good he starts the next song the same way, using the same beginning note. The song is a routine, gettin' back to my baby lyric and fills the time. Same goes for the next one When I See that Girl of Mine except that lines after the initial couplet of the verses stray from the R&B formula into the kind of extension Ray Davies would keep using ("I don't care if it rains or shines") whereby the melodic material reaches out beyond expectations and delivers more tension for the upcoming chorus.
I Am Free is a 6/8 rock waltz of the kind that The Stones were already mastering. Even the guitar interplay is Stonesy with strumming here and biting stabs there. Dave takes another lead. It's pleasant enough and the change in time signature is welcome.
And then the album wakes up. Till the End of the Day blasts to life as a trio of full barre chords crashes down to the open E. "Baby, I feel good, from the moment I rise..." It's a kind of reworking of the early days' chord riffs with new DNA injected. Everything is bright and speedy. The rock band is surrounded by a swarm of extra percussion and it gallops with the energy of the best weekend. Of their surrounding singles and most of this album, this is the song that kids would be getting their threads right for parties, dates, clubs and the whole world of the hungry night. Solid walls of shining harmonies, guitar punches and the pure momentum keep this one hurtling right up to the final four chord crash at the end as the tension between major and minor resolves into a slowly oscillating minor chord. And then you want to hear it again.
Side two. The World Keeps Going Round kicks into life as a kind of Spector wall of sound number if it had been recorded in a garage. Big distorted piano, drums and bass. If there's an electric guitar in there, it's so closely mixed with the piano that it's indistinguishable. Ray comes in with balancing lines: "You worry 'bout the rain. The rain keeps falling just the same." Then the obligatory romance line about breakup before the title line in the chorus resets the knowable cosmos. And then you get this: "What's the use of worrying cause you'll die alone?" Pure Ray Davies bleakness in a song that lopes and crashes like a drunk getting in before dawn. It might sound like bus stop philosophy like "plenty of fish in the sea" but there's a frown to the chorus that prevents any platitudinal warmth from spoiling it. This is the Kinks of See My Friends, their single from the middle of the year, a constant memento mori among the colours of Carnaby Street.
I'm On an Island starts with a strident acoustic chord progression and Davies in as close to the strange calypso accent he would persist with fo rthe next two decades on assorted titles. He's on an island but can't escape. His girl left him and he has nowhere to run. He's the only one on the island. He wouldn't be anywhere else if only she was there with him. This island is much more like the one in John Donne's poem. The approach is comical but it's the same message as See My Friends: being alone and young and abandoned is bleak. There's a perfomative quirk that might have come from playing it live or even just in front of the mic when they recorded it. After the refrain which ends on a held high note he starts the next verse as though out of breath and it sounds like he has been repeating the phrase to himself and anyone who'd hear incessantly: "I'm - on - an - islan'." It's not the first joke song The Kinks did (and certainly wouldn't be the last) but it's the most neatly presented one. A few months afterwards we'd get Dedicated Follower of Fashion and a sub tradtition in the band would be forever with them.
Then you get the anthem so much on the other side of Till the End of the Day that it was its B-side. Where Have all the Good Times Gone? opens with a sledgehammer version of the same chord progression as Till. Instead of the amphetamine rush of that song it's a crashing comedown as Ray whines over a steady rock grind that things are on the downswing. As the song progresses, it's clear how clever this lyric is by unfurling the guilt the previous generation want the new one to feel for taking all their new toys for granted, the delicious freedoms of the night clubs and the culture they were making, and then giving it fifty lashes of sarcasm. The good times haven't gone anywhere, they're here, now and swinging like the rest of London. The pummelling rock of the song feels like a bummer but the clear message is about kicking the downs and jumping into it. It doesn't rush to life like Till the End of the Day but the chorus with its low whinge bvy Ray and high, exuberant descant by Dave let any who will get the joke.
And then you get three songs, just when you thought the record had made its last statement. It's Too Late cunningly mixes a rock progression on acoustic instead of electric with a country melody. Girl regrets her breakup but he's no longer in the mood. What's in store for me matches a stinging 2/4 beat with a boy girl romance plea from Dave. You Can't Win is Ray in snarling mode pretty much just restating the title in different ways.
I've lumped all those together because, as listenable as they are, they cannot match the power of Good Times with its giant scale and strange exubrance. That was the song that should have closed the album, making a perfect compliment to Till the End of the Day on side one. After the big final chord of Good Times it feels like waiting for the post credit sequence in a 2020s film that never comes.
The package was a good one, however. The cover art showed a white background with four unconventional band member shots tha gave way to a large picture of Dave Davies caught with motion blur banging out a power chord on his hollowbody Guild. While the album suffers from the sense of being recorded before its original songs were fully baked, the standouts form peaks and tell listeners of the time that there was more to come.
Listening notes: I strolled around or sat and listened to this as a high resolution download I'd bought from an online shop. It's in mono, not compressed and all of the wincing Shel Talmy production decisions jab at the ear but it is the cleanest version of what appeared on vinyl at the time that you can get.
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