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Music CD - The Kinks: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
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Music CD: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
Artist: The Kinks
List Price: $11.98
Our Price: $7.44
Your Save: $ 4.54 ( 38% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Reprise / Wea
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Tracks:
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1. The Village Green Preservation Society
2. Do You Remember Walter?
3. Picture Book
4. Johnny Thunder
5. Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains
6. Big Sky
7. Sitting By The Riverside
8. Animal Farm
9. Village Green
10. Starstruck
11. Phenomenal Cat
12. All Of My Friends Were There
13. Wicked Annabella
14. Monica
15. People Take Pictures Of Each Other
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0075992621724
Label: Reprise / Wea
Manufacturer: Reprise / Wea
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Reprise / Wea
Release Date: 1990-05-02
Studio: Reprise / Wea
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best of Raymound Douglas Davies
Comment: Mercy " What a recording, It's my personal favorite Of my Kinks collection none are bad . But I love this one best. Sorry beatles
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Triumph
Comment: I have long called the three LPs starting with 'Face to Face' as the Kinks' 'Trinity'. This release was most clearly the best 'concept' album released by any band at the time of its' 1968 release. Ray Davies had already blossomed into a masterful songwriter on the two previous discs (and on singles during the period) and Dave had placed three tunes on 'Something Else' without reducing its' impact. This time, the songs again eschewed rock for a music-hall approach and similar themes recur. The "Village Green Preservation Society" is presented as a sing-along title tune, and reprised in "Village Green"; the memorable "Picture Book" is answered with the final cut, "People Taking Pictures of Each Other". "Do You Remember Walter?" "Animal Farm" and the bossa-nova-inflected "Monica" join "Picture Book" as among the most catchy all-time Kinks songs. "Starstruck", "Johnny Thunder" and several other cuts are not far off. The song that doesn't seem to fit well, a minor quibble, is "Big Sky", which uses spoken verses to convey an unconcerned deity/overseer. The lack of bonus cuts on the generous 15-cut disc is unfortunate, the inclusion of the 1968 single "Days" would have been a plus, but this album is a classic, a must for any serious fan of '60s music and the Kinks in particular.
Customer Rating:
Summary: greatest kinks album!
Comment: absoulutely beautiful! i love every song, worth every penny! my first kinks cd i bought was ultimate kinks (best of cd) and then i got this. i reccommend both. ray davies is a gobsmacking genius!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Journey Through the Past
Comment: The Who's Pete Townsend once said that Ray Davies of the Kinks should be a poet laureate of England. Strong words of praise, but "The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society" is strong enough on its own to make me agree.
During their heyday, the Kinks compiled as substantial and consistent a body of work as anyone in classic rock. Still, while the other three horsemen of the 1960s British Invasion--the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who--rode on to conquer the world, the Kinks remained relegated to also-ran status. Win, place, show--and after that, the Kinks, sadly lumped in on Starbucks compilation CDs with the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dave Clark Five.
As to why this happened, theories abound. Some blame the fact that they couldn't tour the U.S. during their most productive years. Others say their music is more particularly British than, say, the Beatles. Rather than singing about universal and easily translated themes like love and loss, the Kinks sang about English country life, tiny towns with village greens and quaint squares and peaceful rivers. There, to paraphrase Thom Yorke, everything was in its right place; old people maintained an air of reserved politeness while drinking their afternoon tea on lace-covered tables, and youngsters thrilled with the pleasure of a simple first kiss. Such things don't sell well in America, or in the world at large, and they didn't necessarily fit in with the anything-goes forward-thinking groupthink of the late 1960s.
But if time is the ultimate judge, this album will ensure the Kinks are judged second to none. Ray Davies reportedly wrote it as a response to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", as a commemoration of culture rather than a herald of counter-culture, another masterwork--besides the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds"--against which the Beatles supposed high point must be compared. Because of that, this feels--at least to me--more timeless and valuable than Sgt. Pepper's. In the mind's eye, past and future alike can be made flawless, and endlessly compared with the imperfect present. But past images of the future--even the near future--always seem wrong-headed once the future gets here, whereas the past itself never returns to contradict our fuzzy memories of it. Simple pleasures often metamorphosize in memory to golden perfection.
Of course, realities are never that simple. The future won't be perfect, and the past never was. Ray Davies doubtless understood that; this album has a decidedly tongue-in-cheek feel that shows he is in on the con. On the album's title track, he says he is "Saving the old ways from being abused/Protecting the new ways, for me and for you." But there is a passive-aggressiveness and a futility inherent in such vigorous efforts, as evidenced by the snide second track, "Do You Remember Walter?" a timeless meditation on how the fiery idealism of youth mellows and fades into flabby middle age, and how we nonetheless often refuse to accept it when people don't play the roles they used to play in our lives. "I bet you're fat and married now and always home in bed by half past eight/And if I talked about the old times you'd get bored and have nothing more to say," Davies' narrator sings to an old friend from youth, then caps it off with a dynamite line I always wish I'd written: "Yes, people often change/But memories of people can remain."
There are far more pleasures on this album--a harpsichord on "The Village Green" that makes me deliriously happy every time I hear it, a hilariously cynical take on God in "Big Sky" that I never agree with but never fail to enjoy, a charging little song called "Johnny Thunder" that always hits the sweet spot between sweet and sour. And like all classics, it gives new gifts with every revisiting. But that simple line in "Walter" sums up why I love this album. Even though I'm a melancholy Irish-German and this is an all exuberant Englishness, I'd probably put it on my proverbial list of five desert-island CDs. Like all great works of art, it manages to be about far more than itself, for in singing about the aforementioned particulars of English life, the Kinks uncover many larger truths--about nostalgia and longing, and the ways in which we distort the past to save it from destruction.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
Comment: A good collection of songs by The Kinks. There is a general theme but at times the music can be a little slow.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Sensing that the Beatles, Stones, and Who were radically transforming rock music by turning it literate and conceptual, Ray Davies decided the Kinks should be his vehicle to explore his unusual longing for a simpler time when the English empire was not in decline. A reliance on English music hall tradition and sentiments indicated in titles such as "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains," "Picture Book," and "Village Green" clearly show Davies's nostalgia streak. Davies's singing has always been rough and non-Kinks fans may have trouble getting past his sloppy pitch. But for those listening closely, the tales are one of a kind. --Rob O'Connor
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