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The Kink Kronikles wasn’t complied with their participation, but it still manages to condense and present the greatest moments of their most productive and fruitful period. Not technically a greatest hits package since so few of the tracks are actual hits, this is rather an overview to their most influential era. This isn’t the early-punk garage-rock of their debut, this is when they moved into more intricate and complicated structures. To put it simply, this is the greatest Kinks album ever.
The Kink Kronikles is packed to the brim with B-sides, album-only tracks and rarities that rank just as highly as their earliest skuzzy garage-punk assaults like “All Day and All of the Night” or “Stop Your Sobbing.” The gender-bending mind-fuck of “Lola” sounds like a rollicking adolescent male discussing his first blush of sexual excitement, then you pay closer attention to the lyrics and you realize Lola may not be as womanly as our narrator thinks.
That same brand of vicious wit and acerbic bite take effect on the high-energy “David Watts.” But it’s when the Kinks slow things down that I get the most out of this album. “Waterloo Sunset” is their crowning glory. It’s a gorgeous song in every since of the word. “You Really Got Me” might be the most famous, but “Waterloo Sunset” has the most to offer on every artistic, musical and emotional level. And those are just three of the twenty-eight songs included.
Ray Davies, the cocky raunch king of dark come-ons and possibly seedy sex, matures and strengthens as a storytelling song writer. There’s less of a cocksure strut and more concept album ideas being thrown around. “Victoria” and “Village Green Preservation Society” deal with Victorian ideals and imagine a world that’s permanently gray, in only the way that London could be. Slightly baroque, highly pastoral, that would be the best description for this period. And I love every note encased in this eighty-eight minute two-disc set.
This is the best kind of compilation album, a perfect introductory point for the uninitiated and an absolutely necessary addition to the collection for the already initiated. They might have started life as another clan of mop-topped British invaders, but they wound up being hugely influential in their own right. They’re the step-dads of punk, the earliest of hard rockers and an almost folk-ish group of British romantics with far too many realist notions to fully commit. DOWNLOAD: “Waterloo Sunset,” “Lola,” “She’s Got Everything,” “David Watts”
