Customer Reviews

Something Else By the Kinks

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Okay...even in this "original format", this is probably the best Kinks album, but I must lead you to the remastered & expanded import. However, even its original format you get:

David Watts: The famous "fa fa fa fa" song. Great driving rhythm. Blueprint for the Jam (and covered by the Jam in the 70's).

Death of a Clown: over-rated, as far as I'm concerned, but most folks find it to be a classic.

Two Sisters: a transparent metaphor for the rivalry between brothers Dave & Ray. Dave was the rave-up sex toy, and Ray was the jealous domesticated husband/father (at the time).

No Return: absolutely BRILLIANT shuffling, jazzy ditty. Yo La Tengo does a nice cover of this...

Harry Rag: Music hall sing-along tune about everything being okay as long as you've got a smoke.

Tin Soldier Man: another song disparaging the middle class (such as "Well Respected Man"). Great horny section (I mean, section with horns).

Situation Vacant: an organ jiving 60's rocker about giving up everything to keep your mother in law happy (and being miserable as a result).

Afternoon Tea: one of several Ray Davies songs espousing the merits of tea (like "Have a Cuppa Tea")...great Beach Boy'esque harmonies.

Waterloo Sunset: probably Ray Davies single best song...poignant lyrics about love and love's ability to make a substandard environment (have you ever been to Waterloo station?) seem like paradise. Harmonies like melted gold boulion.

The album also includes several other second rate numbers (Lazy Old Sun, Love Me till the Sun Shines, Funny Face, & End of the Season), which are also good/great but pale next to their neighbors.

Finally, the import contains EIGHT bonus tracks included the marvellous "There is No Life without Love" (sounds cheesy, but it's sublime). Do you yourself a favor and get ANY VERSION of this album...even a stretched out 8 track tape. These songs represent, in my opinion, the pinnacle of rock's potential. The Kinks have MANY great albums, and made great songs as late as 1976 (I personally adore the "Soap Opera" album), but this one has the highest number of A+ tracks, and also the greatest stylistic variety.

As I write this review of Something Else I am sitting under the framed album cover autographed by Ray & Dave Davies. I'd waited outside their hotel, sometime early '70's, hoping they'd pop out. I brought my favorite Kinks album, and as Ray signed it, he said: "I don't think even I have a copy of this record." I assumed he was kidding. In any case, he wasn't about to get mine!

My favorite period for the Kinks was part of the least popular in America - that period that encompassed Face to Face, Something Else, and Village Green Preservation Society. Record sales had slunk so low that Reprise Records famously advertised a compilation for one penny with the slogan - "God Save the Kinks!" I have that compilation in my record closet. For my money, everyone should own Face to Face, Something Else, and Village Green, a tryptich of classic songs perfectly delivered. With this era, the Kinks solidified their position as one of the most creative, adventuresome, and accomplished of all their peers.

Something Else opens with David Watts, a wonderful tale of adolescent jealousy and envy. Everybody has known a David Watts - someone who walks on water, someone who always gets their way, for whom everything in life comes easy. Death of a Clown follows this - a song that always makes me sing-a-long with it, even if I haven't been drinking. Something Else includes songs (for the first time?) written by Dave Davies - in addition to Death of a Clown, Dave penned Love Me Till the Sun Shines and Funny Face.

There are songs that harken back to music hall music, like Harry Rag or Tin Soldier Man. A gentle ambiance of nostalgia, bittersweet longing for simplicity, old traditions, times gone by. Afternoon Tea. Lazy Old Sun. End of the Season. Themes that become fully realized on Village Green, but this is the interlude. The transitional album inbetween. It's as much of a concept album as Sgt. Pepper or Tommy or Forever Changes. It's just different. And very British.

But the best is saved for last, Waterloo Sunset. It's been described as the most perfect pop song ever written. A song for the centuries. That's not just my opinion - it's been described that way by Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, David Bowie. It's breathtakingly beautiful. The perfect end to the perfect album.

I will skip the babbling about how great The Kinks are. Here is the order in which I recommend buying their albums:

1. Something Else By The Kinks (5 stars)

2. Face to Face (5 stars)

3. Village Green Preservation Society (5 stars)

4. Arthur... (5 stars)

5. Lola Versus Powerman & The Moneygoround (4.5 stars)

6. Misfits (4 stars)

7. Muswell Hillbillies (4 stars)

The first five are masterpieces. "Something Else" and "Village Green" are cohesive ensemble pieces; "Face to Face" is a fabulous collection of songs. Note that this is not a ranking; this is just the order in which I recommend buying these gems.

Hard to argue with any of the reviews here - even the negative ones. This is a great Kinks album, no doubt. But the Kinks sound in the late 60s early 70s is a bit of an acquired taste. It's at its most commercial on the pop hits of the albums ("David Watts" and "Waterloo Sunset") but the rest of the album is a mixed bag of different styles. There are music hall numbers ("Harry Rag", "End of the Season" and "Tin Soldier Man"), bossa nova inspired love songs ("No Return") real 60s rockers ("Situation Vacant" and "Love Me 'Till the Sun Shines") and obligatory olde-fashioned psychedelia ("Two Sisters" and "Lazy Old Sun"). There is no easy way to classify this album. It really does grow on you but you MUST have a great sense of the absurd. If you can't handle feeling silly while listening to rock, then stay away!

Lead singer/songwriter Ray Davies never shied away from his dislike of modern progress and glorification of a Victorian Utopian England. He mixes his love of the old with the drive of a 60s rock band and the result is "Something Else" indeed. They are the most English of the English invasion bands and if you are simply looking for straight ahead Britpop from the 60s, this is not it. If you are looking for a unique voice and vision from a Britpop band, then check this out. Really fun and different.

When I was in my first semester as a Freshman in college, I was alienated, lonely, going through some terrible trauma and depression. I had loved the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Who since I was little, and they had helped me through such times. Wandering into an record store (this was 1984!) in Boston, I rifled through albums, and saw this one. I had only known the Kinks at that point for You Really Got Me, and a few others, but the cover art and then the titles of the songs made me realize I might be holding a gem I had never discovered.

As I played the album that night, I had one of many revelatory experiences I had only experienced with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and one of many I would have with the Kinks. This is a masterpiece. And you simply cannot try to interpret or criticize it in the context of the Beatles. They are working with material and ideas very different from most anyone else. There is something both very coy and detached, but intimate in a way that speaks to a wistful mentality, one that knows that life can be terribly painful and lonely, but in the middle of it life can also be beautiful and precious. The Kinks present this shade of life in a manner that is not pretentious. Think of all the groups (the Kinks included) who have made melancholy, whimsy and wistfulness pretentious! This album, along with its precursor Face to Face, and it subsequent Village Greene Preservation Society are three of the quiet but wonderful monuments not necessarily to rock music, but just plain great music in general. The album will never tire on me.

Do you like thoughtful, witty Britpop with folky influences? If so, you'll probably want to try 'Something Else' by the Kinks. It begins with 'David Watts,' probably the most upbeat song about envy anyone has ever written, and ends with 'Waterloo Sunset,' possibly the best ballad the Kinks ever recorded and certainly one of the most bittersweet songs of the 1960s. In between, there's lots of jangly guitar, some clever harpsichord runs, and songs that come across as mashups between pub singalongs and Celtic balladry. True, the production values vary a bit throughout and both Ray and Dave Davies aren't the greatest singers on either side of the Atlantic. But the songwriting is first rate, Dave Davies was a criminally under-rated guitarist, and absolutely no one could write lyrics that veered from satirical to compassionate to heartbreaking like Ray Davies did. Simply put, this is an essential CD for anyone who loves the craftsmanship of non-psychedelic late-1960s pop and rock, or the quieter side of alternative rock.

If you're looking for the early 80's hard rock version of the Kinks, you'll probably be better served by 'One For the Road' but 'Something Else' is an unjustly forgotten gem that showcases the Kinks' gentler side.

In the the late 1960s, rock 'n roll began to outgrow "Satisfaction", "Love Me Do", and "You Really Got Me". Not only did bands become more socially and politically aware, they became more ambitious and eager to experiment. For their trouble, many of the great bands from this era - such as The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, and The Beach Boys - were rewarded with not only a secure musical legacy, but healthy financial benefits as well. The Kinks, who were banned from the US between the crucial years of 1965 and 1969, received neither. They had a handful of successful singles, but their LPs went almost completely unnoticed by record buyers.

Fortunately, the pendulum has swung, and The Kinks are now recognized as a major influence on subsequent generations of British rockers. To quote Mick Jones of The Clash, "As far as The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who are concerned, we don't really hear that much about The Kinks. But they're just as important". While the influence of The Beatles and The Stones spreads across the entire spectrum of popular music, that of The Kinks and The Who is most obvious in the punk (British and American) of the late 70s and the Britpop of the early 90s. Like Newton and Leibniz's independent but nearly simultaneous invention of calculus, the fuzzy power chords of these bands' 1964-5 singles laid the groundwork for punk, while assertions like Pete Townshend's "hope I die before I get old" and Ray Davies' "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" - a B-side that appeared 10 years before The Ramones' debut - were philosophical proto-punk manifestos. In the late-60s and early 70s, both bands turned toward catchy, melodic pop songs whose influence would be heard in everyone from The Jam and XTC to Blur and Pulp. And the career trajectory similarities don't stop there: The Kinks and The Who could also be credited - or, if you prefer, blamed - for inventing the rock opera/concept album with their 1969 releases Arthur and Tommy (although The Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow was released a year earlier than both). In the late 70s and early 90s, British groups would be inspired to sound like these British bands who had influenced them, rather than like the American artists who had influenced the British bands of the 60s.

Something Else by The Kinks was arguably the first full-length instance of what would be called Britpop a quarter-century later. (Or maybe it was Face To Face. Take your pick.) The proto-punk and American R&B elements of their first records were less salient on this record, having been replaced by a "distinctly British" blend of marching drums, slow to mid-tempo rockers and ballads, and primarily acoustic - but nonetheless rocking - guitars. Furthermore, the themes moved beyond boy loves girl to musical snapshots of schoolyard jealousy, sibling rivalry, disappointed in-laws, bittersweet solitude and, of course, underachieving circus folk.

It is one thing for a record to culminate in a one-two punch or trio of great songs, but quite another for it to start off with a right, left, and uppercut. That is what we get on Something Else. With the Stonesy thump of "David Watts" (later covered in a faithful if perfunctory manner by The Jam), the quirky, melancholy folk of "Death of a Clown", and the thinly-veiled allegory "Two Sisters", this record wastes no time getting started. And it is hardly on cruise control before closing with "Waterloo Sunset", a feather in the cap (if not jewel in the crown) of 60s British pop.

After the 1-2-3 punch that opens the record, things slow down a bit with "No Return", which, like the similarly hazy and dreamlike "Lazy Old Sun", shows that while the Kinks were not a psychedelic band or a bunch of hippies, they were clearly not impervious to the atmosphere of Swinging London. The same can be said of the hilarious "Harry Rag", which humorously mocks the idea that anything is bearable if you've got the right stuff to take your mind off of it. "End of the Season", sung by Ray in a mock lounge singer voice, is another highlight, and the music hall ditties "Tin Soldier Man" and "Situation Vacant" contribute significant personality to the record.

Then there are Dave Davies' songs. I am a great fan of underdogs and unsung heroes, and I think that it can be said that Dave wrote at least one great song for every dozen or so that Ray did (see Dave's The Album That Never Was for examples). The absurd folk of "Death of a Clown", which reached #3 in the UK, is proof enough: "The trainer of insects is crouched on his knees/And frantically looking for runaway fleas". But Dave also contributes the steady rockers "Love Me Till the Sun Shines" and "Funny Face". Hence, Something Else was for Dave what Revolver was for George Harrison. (The weakest track on the record is probably Ray's "Afternoon Tea". While its subject is quintessentially English, it hardly makes for compelling listening in this case.) And it would be a travesty to not give props to Nicky Hopkins for his superb piano and harpsichord work.

The bonus tracks on the 2000 re-issue are far from the throwaways meant to entice completists that such tracks often are. First of all, Dave rears his underrated head with "Lincoln County" and the excellent "Susannah's Still Alive", which was a hit single in its own right. And Ray's songs - especially "Autumn Almanac", "Wonderboy", "Polly", and "There's No Life Without Love" - are as good as anything to be found on this or any other Kinks record of the era. It may be a bit unfortunate that this re-release is in mono, for it is tempting to say that the stereo version packs more punch. But that is ultimately a matter of taste, and the fact is that this is a fascinating collection of songs, sounding very much like a product of its time - perhaps somewhat charmingly dated - and yet still unlike albums by the band's peers. These elements combine to create a precious gem of the British Invasion, one which would itself spawn the gems of future British Invasions.

Wow flowest...

I don't think I've ever read a review that demanded an immediate response from yours truly like yours did...I guess that could be a good thing, but...you really missed the boat. "Something Else By The Kinks" drivel? Again - Wow.

The Kinks are hugely underrated....maybe THE most underrated band of all-time. This album is the eptiome of 60's cool...melodic, witty and very well done. Funnily enough, you mention the Beatles and the Stones in your review, the two BIG boys of English rock-n-roll....two bands who overshawdowed Ray and Co. for years... (Too bad the Stones didn't quit making albums in the mid-70's, then I would still have respect for them) The Kinks, in my book, are just as good as the Stones, a bit under the Who, and naturally, not quite as good as the guvnurs....but I digress.

Anyway, maybe the Kinks are too English for you or something, but I don't see how you can praise the Beatles and then not be steamrolled by the Kinks melodies or musical genius.

The Kinks are grand, nuff said....This album? Just another five star review...one of their best, if not THE best of their career.

Don't listen to anyone who gives this album one star...that person will probably be off buying the new Blur album soon or something...(get the irony anyone?)

The Kinks are probably the most under-appreciated band in exsistence. They were unquestionably the most British of all of the bands of the British invasion, but were kept out of America due to orders by the American Federation of Musicians. Had they have had the exposure back then, they would be as popular as the Beatles. Buy this album for Waterloo Sunset, the song that Robert Christgau called "the most beautiful song in the English language."

"Something Else" (1967) was released at a point when the Kinks were continuing to top charts in the UK and Europe but were barely registering on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Since their earlier singles "Well-Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," and "Sunny Afternoon," along with their album "Face to Face," Ray Davies had been solidifying his position as a kind of 20th-century W.S. Gilbert with a rock 'n' roll sensibility. By the time the Kinks recorded "Something Else," Davies was writing songs which were in essence mini-operettas that examined England and the English (not, mind you, Britain and the British) with biting wit and wry affection. This album contains what is arguably his greatest composition, "Waterloo Sunset," a blend of almost Dickensian social observation and human sympathy set to an achingly tender yet driving tune that simultaneously conveys deep yearning and profound contentment. There are other outstanding tracks: "David Watts" and "Two Sisters" are clever studies of envy; "Harry Rag" is a Cockney-flavored singalong evocative of the music hall; and "Afternoon Tea" looks forward thematically to the Kinks' "Village Green Preservation Society" (1968). Two of the high points in "Something Else" are a couple of brother Dave Davies's best efforts -- the eerily jaunty "Death of a Clown" and the solid rocker "Love Me Till the Sun Shines." A few numbers, such as "No Return" and "Lazy Old Sun," seemed misguided experiments when the album was new, and they haven't improved with age. And it would have been nice if Reprise had added as bonus tracks such singles of that vintage as "Dead End Street" and "Mr. Pleasant." Still, the weak points can't spoil the overall impact of the Kinks' "Something Else," a true classic and a neglected masterpiece.