Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
decline and fall...begins to sound familiar somehow., July 9, 2001
Poor Arthur...stuck in a dead end job, living in a little house, making ends meet (just barely). His kids are dissatisfied with their lives and with him. Arthur's beloved country, which used to be a world power, is fading in influence, and the people who are supposed to represent the citizens in government are now just venal and corrupted lackeys to the rich. Arthur finds comfort in thinking of the past where everything seemed so orderly and safe, but everything is different now; it's changed, but not for the better...hm, sound familiar?"Arthur," unlike most other English rock albums of the day, is about real people in the real England of 1969. Not paisley hippies wearing swirly frocks, but the people that Ray Davies knew and grew up with, the people who get up and go to work each day and keep things running while the swirly-frock people twitter and glitter. Rock music in 1969 was all about escaping, either escaping through fantasy and drugs (the Who) or through sex and drugs (The Rolling Stones) or through just being rich, arty and drugged up enough to avoid having to deal with reality at all (The Beatles). The Kinks' "Arthur" is the absolute antithesis of all that was going on in pop music in 1969, and as a result it was almost inevitable that people wouldn't understand. Too bad for them. Ray Davies' songwriting is at its absolute best here. He is an acute observer of the human condition. He might make gentle fun of the ordinary guy who buys a hat like Anthony Eden "because it makes him feel like a lord," but he is never cruel or vindictive toward the ordinary people who make up the landscape of "Arthur." Davies is not afraid to excoriate the rich and powerful who take advantage of the Arthurs of the world, as he does in "Yes Sir No Sir," and "Brainwashed," but he's never a doctrinaire revolutionary, as so many rockers were in those days. Davies also has something that most of his songwriting contemporaries lacked: compassion. This album is loaded with the idea that you have to cut people some slack, that you have to understand them and love them the way they are. No matter how difficult things are, family is family, and in order to make it work you have to make allowances for people, and try to do the best you can for each other. That's the underlying message of "Arthur," and it's more effective than a million "All You Need Is Love" chants, in the long run. Oh yeah: this album rocks, too. Dave Davies is truly brilliant here; "Arthur" is a shining moment for him. His fills, his riffing, his leads, his singing: all are dead-on perfect. John Dalton, who joined the band on bass after the accident-prone and road-burnt Pete Quaife left, continues the tradition that the Kinks had of hiring butt-kicking bass players, and Mick Avory drums up everything from skiffle rhythms to jazz to straight-ahead rock. This is one of the Kinks' best albums, but more than that, it's one of the best rock albums, ever. It sounds more pointed and relevant as the years go by, instead of less. How much art can you say that about? On the CD nerd commentary front, this Castle Communications reissue is the one to get; it's been remastered splendidly and contains a slew of extra songs. Most of the extra songs are Dave Davies' tunes, many meant for a solo album that never quite materialized. They're well worth hearing, as is the rest of this splendid album.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Overlooked Masterpiece, October 13, 2000
By 1969 when this album was originally released the Kinks were commercially dead in terms of record sales. They hadn't had a Top 40 hit in the U.S. in three years. Their previous album, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, didn't even crack Billboard's Top 200 album chart. Arthur wasn't much of an improvement. The album peaked at No. 105 and the single "Victoria" reached only No. 62. But if we are to judge artistic merit on record sales, we would have to confer the mantel of genius on Brittney Spears and N'Sync.While Arthur continued to eschew the rock riffs of the early-Sixties Kinks, the album was a logical progression that began with 1967's Face to Face when Ray Davies' songwriting became more personal and reflective. This album-long narrative, originally commissioned as a TV play but never produced, succeeds far better than the Who's Tommy which was released the same year. The album contains some of Ray's best songwriting: "Victoria," "Some Mother's Son," "Shangri-La," "Mr. Churchill Says" and "Arthur." This reissue contains ten bonus tracks, but their only connection to the original release (except for the mono mix of "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina) is that they were all recorded in 1969. Seven of these tracks were written by Dave Davies, including the previously unreleased "Mr. Shoemakers Daughter." In the title track, Ray poses the question: "How is your life and your Shangri-la/And your long lost land of Halelujah/And your hope and glory has passed you by/ Can't you see what the world is Doing to ya?" Too many of the Kinks fans passed this by upon its first release. Here's a second chance at discovering one of a handful of Kinks masterpieces. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great almost-unheard albums; great bonus tracks, February 16, 2003
By A Customer
This is definitely one of the Kinks finest albums (just a notch below "The Village Green Preservation Society"), and it is even one of the best albums of 1969, holding its own against the fine albums of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Velvet Underground and others from that same year.
The ablum does have a few flaws, of course. It was the longest album the Kinks had made up until that point (clocking in at just under 50 minutes), and some of the songs could have been shorter by a bit: "Yes Sir, No Sir" and "Mr. Churchill Says," for instance, and especially "Australia," which ends with an unnecessary jam that now sounds extremely dated. But overall, the album is well-constructed. "Victoria" and "Arthur" are great rockers. Amazing slower songs include "Young and Innocent Days" and the anti-war "Some Mother's Son."
Musically, this was Ray Davies' finest effort. Though he had displayed his ability to write catchy, even beautiful, pop songs for several albums before this one, "Arthur" displayed a greater level of sophistication in his songwriting. For example, he contrasts English folk with '60s-style rock more cleverly than he had done before. This contrast is particularly evident within the span of five minutes in "Shangi-La," one of this album's highlights. Meanwhile, his lyrics are better on the whole this time around. On other Kinks albums, songs with great lyrics are often interspersed between sweet pop songs that sound great, but have really dumb words to them. Here, Davies sticks to the theme, singing of an increasingly complicated English life filled with generational differences, the turmoils associated with growing old and the difficulties faced by the working class. Though that theme lends itself to overly serious lyrics, they're delivered (for the most part) without heavy-handedness, and there's still a bit of humor to be found here and there.
The long and the short of it: every rock collection should own this album.
Also, this particular issue is all the more essential because it includes great bonus tracks like "Plastic Man" and "Mindless Child of Motherhood." The remaserted sound is great, too. It's certainly worth tracking down.
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by The Kinks 
