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Side One is a distillation of everything the band had learnt up to that time, plus what was going round that year (1965). So you get the blues cover which leads off - Sleepy John Estes' `Milk Cow Blues'. Usually The Kinks were awful when they did blues covers, but they pull this one off. It's a messy jam, but it's messy in the right way. `Ring the Bells' sounds like a quiet Lovin' Spoonful tune; and `When I see that Girl of Mine' is pure Buddy Holly. The side closes with `Til the End of the Day' - the last of the Kinks power chord singles in the `You Really Got Me'/'All Day and All of the Night' vein. And it's as good as any of those classics.
The next three tracks - the first half of side two on the old vinyl version - point the way to the future. `The World Keeps Going Round' is the first of Kink leader Ray Davies' weary old man songs. "Times'll be hard, Rain will fall, and you'll feel mighty low/But the world keeps going `round" he sings to what sounds like an attempt at a Phil Spector production without a Phil Spector budget. `I'm on an Island' is about the need to get away from modern civilisation - a theme Ray was to return to again and again. And like many of Davies' later songs with this theme, such as `Apeman' and `Supersonic Rocketship', it has a vaguely Caribbean feel.
The title of the third portent of Kinks to come, `Where have all the good times gone' speaks for itself. The Kinks were to spend much of their career singing about a semi-mythical Edwardian past, and this one sets out the manifesto with understated wit:
"Ma and Pa looked back on all the things they used to do/Didn't have no money and they always told the truth/Daddy didn't have no toys/And Mummy didn't need no boys".
And Davies' vocal as he delivers this verse has just the right edge to it to let you know he isn't fooled for an instant, and he doesn't expect you to be either.
While the next few songs are pretty standard stuff, the bonus tracks add to the album. There's two versions of the `Dedicated Follower of Fashion' - a song whose title has passed into the English language. It's not a particularly subtle satire, but it makes its point in a tuneful enough way, and contains one of Davies' best performances as a vocalist-cum-radio-comedian. While `Dedicated...' has been on countless greatest hit compilations, `Sitting on My Sofa', the B side, is a comparative rarity. It's a classic early Kinks rave-up - and, like `Milk Cow Blues' it's a shambles in a good way.
This isn't a great album, by a long chalk, but it shows this fascinating band at a key stage of their development. If you've got the obvious 1960s classics from this band (Village Green, Arthur, Face to Face) and their best later work (Muswell Hillbillies) this isn't a bad place to go next.
superb. Each cd contains the a complete album unaltered plus ALL TRACKS RECORDED CONCURRENTLY that saw release. As a Kinks fan I bought the lot. I've since thrown them all away. The mastering is terrible. This is the worst of the lot, but they are all bad.
Take one that is pretty fair, say Kinda Kinks and then a/b the tracks with same tracks off the Rhino Kinda kinks from some 10 years ago. No comparison. What a shame! The only recent reissue that made me angrier was 1 (the beatles) which is without a doubt the worst sounding reissue by a major rocker EVER. see my review at that site.
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