Something Else By The Kinks

The Kinks have some great tracks but very few were present here. Overall, a short and relatively harmless listen, but not one that’s stood the test of time compared to others of the era.

Kinks have some of the better and more interesting lyrics in music. The songs on this album don’t have that timeless sound - very 60s. “Two Sisters” and “Love yme till the Sun Shines” and “Lazy Old Sun” stood out to me. I’m just not a fan of organ music in most music. “Waterloo Sunset” is the best song on the album. Overall, a good album.

Cool album! I liked it.

really, not a very special album at all

two sisters interesting motiv

Occasionally there are good moments but it just felts like weird art schoolusic that tries to be quirky for its own sake. 2 out of 5

So underrated

Another Kinks album I really enjoyed! I'm pretty thankful that album generator gave me a window into The Kinks for the first time, as I've really dug them and they'll be one of my forever bands now.

Inoffensive, unexceptional. The 2nd Kinks album I received from this project in as many weeks, and neither have left any sort of mark on my memory. It's all just...fine.

A good rock album from the late 60s by the The Kinks. It doesn't have the highs of You Really Got Me, but fun romp.

very good. lets all drink to the death of a clown. 4.1/5

It’s not terrible, but it is absolutely void of personality in my opinion. Sounds like so much other music from the time, and it just goes on and on.

The greatest compliment I can pay Something Else by The Kinks is that it contains twelve songs capable of offering serious competition to Waterloo Sunset. Given that the latter would probably make my personal top ten songs on most days, that’s a fairly extraordinary achievement. And while Waterloo Sunset remains the towering masterpiece, it wasn’t even my favourite discovery during this particular listening. That honour belongs to the wonderfully peculiar Lazy Old Sun. What makes this album so remarkable isn’t any great conceptual ambition or revolutionary technological innovation. It’s the sheer quality of the songwriting. Thirteen largely unconnected compositions, exploring a bewildering variety of musical styles, held together by a fierce musical intelligence and an almost ruthless commitment to craft. There’s scarcely a wasted second. Every musical decision appears to have been made in service of the individual song, rather than some overarching idea of what a Kinks album ought to sound like. It’s hard graft and solid craft, and I find that rather more impressive than a great deal of the supposedly groundbreaking music being made at the time. I was struck almost immediately by the extraordinary economy of the writing. Two Sisters and No Return both clock in at 124 seconds, yet neither feels remotely incomplete. The former tells an entire domestic story, including a rather subtle reversal of perspective, while the latter establishes an exquisitely wistful atmosphere through a remarkably accomplished excursion into bossa nova. Neither needs a guitar solo, an extended bridge or an instrumental passage to make up the running time. They finish because they’ve accomplished everything they set out to do. This economy runs through much of the album. Ray Davies seems to regard three minutes as an extravagance, and even when the songs become longer during the second half, there’s little sense of unnecessary elaboration. Situation Vacant, for example, earns its extended instrumental coda by giving the music a dramatic function beyond the completion of the narrative. Perhaps the most significant distinction is that these aren’t abbreviated versions of longer songs. They’re complete musical constructions that happen to be short. Davies understands when a musical idea has been exhausted and appears entirely uninterested in keeping the musicians occupied simply because they’re there. The range of those musical constructions is astonishing. There’s music hall, urban folk, bossa nova, nursery rhyme, heavy pop, social satire, theatrical melancholy, psychedelia and something resembling pre-war sophisticated popular song. Yet the movement between them never feels like a series of exercises in genre imitation. Each idiom has been selected because it offers particular possibilities for the song being written. This led me to think about the album’s relationship with the recording studio. By 1967, the album was increasingly becoming an artistic object independent of what a rock group could reproduce onstage. Revolver had already demonstrated how recording technology could create music that was practically impossible to perform live in its original form. But Something Else takes a rather different approach. The difficulty of reproducing this album faithfully in concert isn’t primarily technological. It’s that you’d need so many bloody instruments. David Watts works perfectly well as a live rock song. No Return could easily retain its delicacy in a live performance. Harry Rag might work without any accompaniment whatsoever. But attempting to reproduce all thirteen studio arrangements would require a small orchestra pit, a formidable collection of instruments and a stage crew with plenty to do. The studio has become a playbox, but not principally a technological one. It allows each composition to inhabit its own musical world without requiring the four Kinks to maintain a consistent instrumental vocabulary. There’s something almost theatrical about it. The album resembles a repertory company presenting thirteen different productions, each with its own scenery, costumes, conventions and characters. The same creative intelligence informs them all, but no two productions need resemble one another. That thought also helps explain why the album reminded me so strongly of Blur’s Parklife, a comparison that emerged within the first two songs and became increasingly persuasive as the record progressed. The resemblance isn’t confined to the familiar observation that Damon Albarn was influenced by Ray Davies. It’s there in the theatrical construction, the delight in musical characterisation, the exaggerated Britishness and the frequent discrepancy between jaunty music and considerably less cheerful subject matter. David Watts opens proceedings with an almost indecent amount of rhythmic invention. Having known the Jam’s later version for years, I was surprised to find the original more rhythmically interesting. The Jam supply greater force and insistence, but the Kinks have a delightfully eccentric syncopation, particularly in the introduction. There’s a looseness to the interplay between piano and rhythm section that makes the song bounce in unexpected directions. The studio chatter and edited count-in also recall the opening of the Beatles’ Taxman, another example of the constructed spontaneity that recording studios were beginning to exploit. Lyrically, the song presents a more complicated proposition than straightforward admiration and envy. David Watts possesses virtually every credential that respectable society could demand: sporting achievement, academic distinction, popularity and social standing. The narrator clearly wants what David has, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Davies shares his admiration. I was reminded of Terry Jones’s interpretation of Chaucer’s Knight, in which an apparently admiring portrait acquires a rather different meaning once the values being celebrated are properly examined. The narrator’s admiration can be perfectly sincere while the songwriter invites us to question the social machinery that produces it. That’s a useful distinction throughout this album. Davies’s characters express values and attitudes that needn’t be his own. He can inhabit their perspectives without endorsing them. Death of a Clown introduces another recurring concern. Its unusual opening piano-string sound has the bright, resonant quality of a hammered zither or dulcimer, giving the recording a faintly antique theatrical atmosphere. The song itself resembles a mournful pub sing-along, a communal celebration of an entertainer’s private despair. There’s something deliciously contradictory about the construction. A performer whose professional identity is collapsing becomes the subject of another entertainment in which everybody can cheerfully participate. I was reminded of David Bowie’s performance in Extras, where a thoroughly miserable man becomes the subject of an uproariously enjoyable communal song. But there’s a sadness here that runs through the Davies brothers’ work, resurfacing years later in Come Dancing. Both songs concern forms of entertainment that once possessed enormous personal and social significance but have become redundant or disappeared. In one, the clown’s skills no longer have a place in the world. In the other, the dance hall has vanished, taking its rituals, relationships and memories with it. The music reconstructs the pleasure of something that the lyric tells us is disappearing. It’s a recurring kind of tragic nostalgia, although I don’t think Ray Davies is an instinctive conservative. There’s an important difference between wanting to restore the past and recognising that something valuable has been lost. Two Sisters complicates the question of Davies’s supposed conservatism still further. It’s an engaging little domestic vignette in which one sister envies the freedom and glamour of the other before recognising the value of her own family life. I was particularly amused by what I heard as the name Purcilla, given her association with the washing machine and the possible echo of Persil. Whether the association was deliberate is uncertain, but the domestic characterisation is remarkably economical. The song lasts scarcely more than two minutes, yet manages to establish both women’s circumstances, develop an emotional conflict and resolve it without any musical padding. It struck me as a kind of She’s Not Leaving Home, a reversal of the Beatles’ contemporary examination of domestic dissatisfaction. Where so much rock music in 1967 was concerned with freedom from conventional responsibilities, Davies allows a woman to contemplate escape and decide that her existing life contains something worth valuing. That might be read as socially conservative, but I don’t think it’s necessarily that simple. The washing machine hasn’t disappeared, and neither have her responsibilities. She’s reconsidered what they mean to her. The song doesn’t require us to accept domesticity as universally desirable, only to recognise that liberation needn’t always mean abandoning it. There’s a productive tension with Tin Soldier Man, which later ridicules the conformity of respectable suburban adulthood through something resembling a nursery rhyme. The connection with Malvina Reynolds’s Little Boxes is immediate: adults reduced to manufactured figures inhabiting prescribed social roles. That prompted a rather wider thought about how much of adulthood is itself a performance. Even now, people describe themselves as being hopeless at adulting, as though maturity consists of a collection of procedures that must be learned and performed rather than a fundamental transformation of identity. The tin soldier is playing at being a grown-up, but perhaps we all are to some extent. The distinction between these two songs may therefore concern the relationship between individuals and their circumstances. Two Sisters allows somebody to discover satisfaction in a familiar life. Tin Soldier Man questions the acceptance of a life prescribed by social convention. Davies is less interested in delivering a consistent manifesto than in examining different ways people negotiate their existence. No Return provides one of the album’s most delightful changes of musical direction. Remarkably, I’d encountered it only three weeks earlier, also on a Saturday, through Bebel Gilberto’s interpretation on Tanto Tempo. Hearing the original so soon afterwards was an unexpected pleasure. It’s a thoroughly convincing bossa nova composition, although Davies brings a distinctive quality to the idiom. I described it during listening as bossa nova in the rain. The rhythmic vocabulary belongs to Brazil, but the emotional atmosphere seems unmistakably North London. Much of that comes from Davies’s singing. He has a characteristic habit that I think of as pitch exploration: rather than attacking notes cleanly, he often bends or feels his way into them, occasionally seeming to hesitate before settling. Paul McCartney, by comparison, generally presents the melodic architecture more directly. In No Return, that uncertainty is precisely what makes the performance so affecting. The rhythmic accompaniment is relaxed and assured, while the vocal seems emotionally reluctant to commit itself. There’s a wistfulness in the very act of approaching the notes. It’s a beautifully judged use of 124 seconds. Harry Rag heads somewhere completely different. I initially thought of it as folk music, rather than the music-hall exercise it might superficially resemble. There’s a hey nonny nonny quality to its rhythm, a succession of verses and a refrain that practically demands audience participation. I could imagine a folk performer spending several minutes teaching the chorus to an audience, congratulating them on their progress and finally announcing that they were ready to attempt the song itself. It might work just as well sung unaccompanied, finger firmly in ear. But I wouldn’t describe it as belonging to some romanticised rural English tradition. This is urban folk, grounded in working-class London, colloquial language, cigarettes and the small pleasures of ordinary life. Much of the English folk repertoire we cherish developed during or after the Industrial Revolution anyway. Folk music didn’t cease to develop when people moved from agricultural communities into industrial towns. I was reminded of participating in what was probably one of the first student productions of Jim Cartwright’s Road, in which we used The Weaver and the Factory Maid. What interested me about that song was that industrialisation wasn’t merely threatening the handloom weaver’s occupation. The organisation of factory work had disrupted his romantic life. His lover’s working circumstances no longer permitted their accustomed meetings. It’s a reminder that folk music has long concerned itself with ordinary people’s encounters with changing social and economic conditions. Harry Rag belongs naturally in that tradition, despite being written by a successful rock musician in 1967. And it demonstrates once again how Davies uses the musical form appropriate to the subject rather than requiring the subject to fit the conventions of rock. Situation Vacant is the first occasion on which the Kinks sound unequivocally like a muscular rock group. It’s a sour little domestic story about a perfectly adequate marriage destroyed by the wife’s mother’s insistence that her son-in-law should improve his circumstances. Johnny abandons a satisfactory position in pursuit of something better, and ends up unemployed, impoverished and separated. It recalled Lennon’s Good Morning Good Morning, particularly in its acidic treatment of suburban dissatisfaction. But where Lennon gives us a succession of observations that cumulatively establish an atmosphere of stagnation, Davies tells a self-contained story about the mechanisms by which unhappiness is created. The extended coda is particularly interesting. Its heavy, increasingly insistent instrumental treatment can be heard as embodying the oppressive weight of Johnny’s mother-in-law, whose interference has overwhelmed his life. The narrative has reached its unhappy conclusion, but the music continues to exert pressure. Here, the extra running time earns its place. Economy doesn’t always mean brevity. It means understanding what the composition requires. Dave Davies’s three contributions offer another dimension to the album. They initially appear more directly concerned with personal emotional distress than Ray’s carefully constructed social portraits, often setting helplessness against forceful musical arrangements. Love Me Till the Sun Shines is an excellent example of what I’d call heavy pop. The guitars are muscular, the rhythmic attack emphatic, and the composition remains firmly anchored in melody. Yet the narrator is romantically helpless. The music supplies all the confidence that the singer lacks. That contrast struck me as a rather revealing piece of honesty from a rock musician. There’s no particular reason why somebody capable of dominating a stage or making an enormous noise with an electric guitar should be equally accomplished at relationships or ordinary domestic life. Musical prowess doesn’t automatically confer emotional competence. It’s a peculiar aspect of rock mythology that public confidence can so easily be mistaken for personal self-possession. Dave’s song allows the contradiction to remain visible. But Funny Face is considerably more disturbing. Its lyrics appear to assemble fragments of painful personal experience into something that no longer functions as straightforward autobiography. Images of separation, frosted windows, doctors, crying eyes and inaccessible loved ones create a deeply unsettled emotional landscape. What makes the song remarkable is the discrepancy between that fragmented material and the meticulous musical composition. There’s a sudden movement into something resembling an eerie choir during the passage about the frosted windows, and the recurring refrain takes on an increasingly troubling character. The repeated insistence that everything is all right becomes progressively less convincing. Is the narrator reassuring somebody else, attempting to reassure himself, refusing to acknowledge what has happened or simply desperate to impose a satisfactory conclusion upon an experience that offers none? The song doesn’t resolve the contradiction. It’s a beautifully composed piece of music whose formal coherence makes its emotional disorder more disturbing. Dave isn’t simply pouring his feelings into a recording. He’s exercising considerable craft in the way those feelings are presented. That distinction also prevents an easy division between Ray as craftsman and Dave as instinctive emotional performer. Both are meticulous composers, even when their approaches differ. My favourite discovery, however, remains Lazy Old Sun. It’s an extraordinary piece of woozy psychedelia, and almost immediately reminded me of Alex James’s Far Out from Blur’s Parklife. Both have that peculiar combination of cosmic subject matter, childlike imagination, dreamlike arrangement and thoroughly English eccentricity. The conceit is wonderfully funny. Davies addresses the Sun as though it were a lazy elderly relative who has spent billions of years occupying the same armchair, apparently doing absolutely nothing. There’s a glorious absurdity in characterising as idle something whose continuing activity makes practically all life on Earth possible. The juxtaposition of childhood memory with astronomical time is particularly engaging. Davies remembers a world measured in the height of a small child, while addressing an object that existed before there was any world to remember. And rather than turning this into a solemn psychedelic revelation about humanity’s place in the universe, he makes it affectionate and faintly ridiculous. It’s cosmology translated into domestic comedy. The most important character in the neighbourhood is a lazy old sod who never seems to do anything. Musically, the song wanders in a way that much of the album refuses to do. The harmonies become woozy, the arrangement drifts through unexpected places, and the whole performance seems to revel in its own eccentricity. Yet it never feels aimless. The rambling quality is essential to its character. This created an interesting contradiction in my response to the album. I’d spent much of the listening admiring the fierce economy of its construction, yet my favourite discovery was a song that seemed to relax that discipline more than almost anything else on the record. Perhaps the real virtue isn’t concision but appropriateness. Davies knows when a song needs to be direct and when it needs to wander. Lazy Old Sun would lose much of its peculiar charm if subjected to the narrative efficiency of Two Sisters. Afternoon Tea returns to another of Davies’s musical personae. His voice acquires that narrowed, nasal, almost band-pass-filtered quality familiar from Sunny Afternoon and Dedicated Follower of Fashion. In the latter, the vocal mannerisms can evoke an old gramophone record from the 1920s, as though the singer were deliberately holding his nose to create the appropriate period sound. Davies doesn’t always require the recording engineer to make him sound antiquated. He can accomplish a surprising amount through vocal characterisation alone. The exaggerated Englishness of Afternoon Tea belongs to a broader tendency in the aftermath of Swinging London, where Edwardian clothes, music hall, Victoriana and familiar domestic rituals became material for contemporary pop art. But beneath the cosy, rather comic presentation is another song about loss. Donna is no longer there to share the afternoon tea, and the familiar ritual has been emptied of its emotional meaning. The tea remains. The time of day remains. What has disappeared is the person who made those things matter. That brings us back to the brothers’ recurring fascination with the things that disappear from people’s lives. What was once ordinary becomes precious through its absence, and music can reconstruct the pleasure even while acknowledging that it is irretrievable. End of the Season offers a particularly sophisticated variation upon this theme. The narrator sounds like a newly disenfranchised Tory, faintly tipsy in his smoking jacket, mourning the end of summer, his absent lover, his accustomed social pleasures and the appalling inconvenience of a Labour government. The languid musical treatment reminded me strongly of Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You, with a distinct suggestion of Noël Coward about the performance. Davies sounds as though he’s several gin and tonics into an evening that has failed to meet his expectations. It’s extremely funny. The man’s social assumptions are almost comically entitled, and his apparent conviction that the political situation has somehow deprived him of his entire reason for living is deliciously absurd. But then there’s the opening seasonal imagery, where the approaching winter and the silence of the birds become inseparable from the absence of his lover. That reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s poetry following the death of Emma Gifford. Hardy’s post-Emma poems contain some extraordinarily moving expressions of grief, made all the more uncomfortable by the long deterioration of their marriage and his treatment of Emma while she was alive. Much of the writing seems concerned not only with loss but with belated recognition of what had been lost, and perhaps what had never been properly appreciated. I think of this as Joni Mitchell syndrome, after Big Yellow Taxi: discovering the value of something only when it has disappeared. But there’s another dimension. Sometimes we mourn not merely a person but the version of ourselves that existed in their company. The vanished relationship becomes inseparable from a vanished period of our own lives. That possibility gives End of the Season more emotional complexity than its satirical presentation might initially suggest. The narrator is unquestionably ridiculous in aspects of his social outlook, but his emotional loss can nevertheless be genuine. Davies manages to make him simultaneously laughable and touching. The affected, slightly unsteady vocal performance contributes to both responses. It’s another demonstration of how successfully musical characterisation can accommodate contradictory feelings without requiring the songwriter to explain them. And finally, Waterloo Sunset. I almost feel that including it gives the album an unfair advantage. It’s one of those songs whose greatness seems to transcend the ordinary business of comparing records. It would probably appear in my personal top ten songs on most days, and hearing it again hasn’t diminished that regard in the slightest. What struck me particularly on this occasion was its contemplative psychedelia. The song functions simultaneously as a miniature character study and an almost disconnected observation of London going about its business. Davies’s narrator watches the river, the crowds, the station and the relationship between Terry and Julie, remaining apart from the activity surrounding him. But his detachment isn’t necessarily a source of unhappiness. There’s a remarkable sense of contentment in his position as observer. He doesn’t need to join the crowds or intrude upon the lovers to find meaning in what he’s witnessing. That’s a subtle emotional proposition. Solitude needn’t be loneliness, and the pleasures of the world needn’t require direct participation. The music communicates that contentment with extraordinary delicacy. There’s something almost transcendent about the layered, luminous sounds of the coda, a combination of voices and shimmering instrumental textures that seems to distil an entire strain of British psychedelia into a few moments. Yet there’s nothing grandiose about its subject. No cosmic journey, no announcement of spiritual enlightenment, no elaborate metaphysical conceit. Just London, a river, two lovers and a man watching the evening unfold. I was reminded of Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman, another song in which geography becomes inseparable from emotional experience. But I would sharpen the comparison beyond saying that one is American and the other British. Waterloo Sunset could hardly have come from anywhere but London. The immense physical distances of the American landscape give Wichita Lineman its particular expression of longing and solitude. The extraordinary concentration of human life in London gives Waterloo Sunset its entirely different emotional character. One song finds longing across enormous distances. The other finds contentment amid enormous proximity. Neither could simply be transplanted to another setting without losing something essential. And that makes Waterloo Sunset one of the most perfect examples I know of a pop song creating a complete sense of place while expressing something much more universal. There’s an additional pleasure in encountering it at the end of this album. After twelve songs that demonstrate so many different aspects of the Davies brothers’ compositional intelligence, Waterloo Sunset doesn’t feel like a completely unrelated masterpiece tacked on as a reward. It feels like the culmination of a record that has repeatedly shown how much can be accomplished through careful attention to the particular demands of an individual composition. One thing that bothered me during this listening was a brief excursion into some of the existing reviews on the 1001 Albums site. I was struck by how superficial much of the writing seemed. Too often, the album was being approached primarily as an artefact of its period, or as an acknowledged ancestor of subsequent British music, rather than as something being heard and examined with contemporary ears. I don’t mean that historical context is unimportant. Quite the opposite. But establishing Ray Davies’s place in British popular music isn’t the same thing as understanding what these recordings actually do. The rhythmic inventiveness of David Watts, the narrative economy of Two Sisters, the unlikely success of No Return as English bossa nova, the urban folk construction of Harry Rag, the unsettling relationship between lyrical fragmentation and musical discipline in Funny Face, or the eccentric cosmology of Lazy Old Sun — these aren’t merely historical curiosities. They’re musical achievements that remain available to anybody prepared to listen closely. And perhaps the most rewarding discovery was that the album’s extraordinary variety never became exhausting. Each song establishes its own terms, develops its idea and then makes way for the next. The transitions are often startling, but the consistency of the craftsmanship provides a continuity deeper than genre. There is no need to invent a concept to explain the album’s coherence. Nor is it necessary to locate some single political, social or philosophical argument that unites its songs. Indeed, some of the apparent contradictions are precisely what make the writing interesting. Davies can celebrate domestic contentment and ridicule suburban conformity. He can make an upper-class reactionary both ridiculous and sympathetic. He can treat the disappearance of familiar institutions as a genuine loss without requiring us to endorse the values associated with them. These are observations about people, not instructions about how people should live. And the music is never merely an accompaniment to those observations. It is integral to their meaning. The rhyming folk refrain, the nursery-rhyme simplicity, the heavy instrumental coda, the bossa nova rhythm, the spectral harmonies and the drunken crooning are all part of the storytelling. What emerges is a record of enormous musical curiosity disciplined by exceptional craft. Waterloo Sunset remains the masterpiece, but Lazy Old Sun was the revelation. And that distinction matters. It demonstrates that the album has considerable value beyond the song that brought me to it with such high expectations. The best thing I can say about Something Else by The Kinks is that it’s Waterloo Sunset and twelve other really good songs — songs so consistently inventive and beautifully made that they offer genuine competition to one of the finest pop compositions ever written. A suite of unconnected songs, connected by fierce musical intelligence. Hard graft, solid craft, and an enormous amount of pleasure. Absolutely magnificent.

The Kinks’ run of exceptional albums started with "Face to Face" and continued with "Something Else by The Kinks". The Kinks created an understated, wistful portrait of post-war English life that sounded nothing like anything else at that time. The quality is consistently high throughout but there are a number of standout tracks, and of course, the album is bookended by the sharp energy of "David Watts" and the evocative beauty of "Waterloo Sunset". Side one 1 "David Watts" (5/5) 2 "Death of a Clown" (5/5) 3 "Two Sisters" (5/5) 4 "No Return" (4/5) 5 "Harry Rag" (5/5) 6 "Tin Soldier Man" (4/5) 7 "Situation Vacant" (4/5) Side two 1 "Love Me Till the Sun Shines" (4/5) 2 "Lazy Old Sun"  (4/5) 3 "Afternoon Tea" (4/5) 4 "Funny Face" (4/5) 5 "End of the Season" (5/5) 6 "Waterloo Sunset" (5/5) Total - 58 Average - 4.5 454/1001 239/454 albums reviewed were new to me.

I’m never sure with the The Kinks… the ultra twee English life thing must surely be somewhat ironic, or at least layered with some wry look at a darkness beneath the surface, but listening to through a whole album it does feel like there’s a bit too much that is just sickly twee… There’s a lot of really nice stuff here, of course, and maybe at a time before most music had any edge it was dripping with cynical nuance, but the end result is just a bit too twee!

Waterloo Sunset is the only reason this gets higher than a one. A slow burn album with no pay off, highly influenced by The Beatles… really not for me.

A few good songs, some not as memorable ones. Averages to a 3.5 but bringing it down a half star for the "must listen" portion of it. Better Kinks on here

I think I would like to listen to something else by The Kinks.

Can we maybe have something else please?

Waterloo Sunset, what a tune. The rest is filler unfortunately.

I don’t know why the Kinks aren’t talked about more. Is it because they sound too much like the Beatles? Probably, but the songs are good.

Better than Coldplay

There are a couple of songs on this album that get airplay from time to time and I really like: “David Watts” and “Waterloo Sunset.” Do the rest live up to those? Yes indeed, these are fun, quirky songs; probably more impactful in England in 1967, but I like the lyrics to a lot of them. “Two Sisters” is touching. “No Return” surprised me with its bossa-nova-adjacent tune. On the whole, a pleasant, toe-tapping album. Very English. The percussion section is fun.

Very quirky and with a couple of tracks that endure, particularly Waterloo Sunset. Overall too quirky and ditsy for my taste. Reminds of the worst instincts of Paul McCartney for writing cutsey ditties but if you have to have them McCartney does them better.

What a band. Need to investigate that discog #kinks

You can hear in every song how much this band has influenced modern artists today. The kinks are foundational to any flavor of rock and for good reason!

まあ、このアルバムの説明文としてはイギリスの風景を皮肉めいて歌っているものなのかな。歌詞の内容はわかんないんでメロディーから評価するしかないんだけど、これも前評価したキンクスのやつと同じような感じで、多分僕はこの二つのアルバムのどっちですかを当てろみたいなこと言われたら、無理な気がする。　 僕のイメージするビートルズの初期がこんな感じ。

Not terrible.

A little bored of listening to The Kinks to be honest. Perfectly good album bait lyrically it feels so trite. Like nursery rhymes.

Yikes, what a boring album! The Kinks have a handful of good songs, and none of them appear on here. A poor imitation of The Beatles that doesn't creatively move anything forward, except perhaps the Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto influenced Bossa Nova "No Return". Even that is a fairly weak attempt at Bossa Nova. When they get back into their own wheelhouse, "Afternoon Tea" is okay. Way overrated and makes me feel increasingly that The Kinks are overrepresented on this list. Faves: "Afternoon Tea" and "Waterloo Sunset"

Boring Brit Rock album.

I feel similar about this as I did the first Kinks album. Fun and poppy music, but nothing really special. Beatles like but just nowhere near as good. Waterlook Sunset is a wonderful song thought! Top Songs: Two Sisters, End of the Season, Waterloo Sunset

When I was a kid the edgy thing to do was to say you liked The Kinks more than The Beatles. I'm not sure anyone ever really meant it, but at the same time you can see why people would take that stance. It doesn't feel like The Kinks will ever be somebody's dad's music, there is something about them that is more inherently weird and disruptive. I think that's true even in the English country gentlemen schtick, even though that's not my favorite aspect of them. It's why this particularly album ends up as a three to me. I gave "Face to Face" a 4... honestly might have to listen to all the major albums to know what I think of each of them.

It started ok but got stale fast. The lyrics were making me laugh. He's just a lad that likes complaining about first world problems.

This was fine I wasn’t in love with it Playlist add: “Afternoon Tea”

Enjoyment: 5/10 Replayability: 4/10 Cohesion: 5/10 Flow/Pacing: 3/10 Artistic Merit: 4/10 Weighted Average: 4.4/10 Review: The last time I listened to the Kinks on here, the album was a slow burn but I think it paid off in the end. But this one feels like an even slower burn with even less pay off. I've listened to it 3 times through now and all the tracks in the middle are forgettable filler, which is disappointing. Liked Song(s): David Watts, Situation Vacant, Waterloo Sunset Disliked Song(s): Harry Rag Recommend? Maybe Heard Before? No

Was maybe gonna get a 3....but I just love Waterloo sunset so much so....FOUR

creo que me gustó de ondo. idk deje de escuchar

Fun and interesting album that feels like a time capsule of the era. Not something I would listen on the regular but definitely worth a listen.

Just not that interesting. Nice psychedelic influences and some good British lyricism but didn’t blow me away. 3 stars.

Continuing with the baroque pop style that just comes across as tinny and washed out to modern ears. I can only assume that 60s Hifi systems were incredibly tinny and simplistic for this to not stand out as awful. When it works well it’s great but even “Waterloo Sunset” and “David Watts” might not be enough to raise this from a 1. I thought I like the Kinks but this proves me wrong … again. The third on this list that is good in places but overall not worth the time It’s mind boggling that Death of a Clown was a single, let alone that it got to number 3 (Uk an Germany)

typical kinks albus 60ish, beatlesish a little baroque pop

I guess that's Something Else by The Kinks. Anyway, overall not a bad album but it does sound a bit outdated nowadays. That doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable. It was alright leaving it in the background while I was doing things and it had this music vibe from around that time.

waterloo sunset ❤️

How can you not love the Kinks? I’ve always been a Village Green Preservation Society man myself, but I never hate a journey into their other albums. This was one I’d never stepped foot in, but in a way, it felt like home the second the needle dropped.

Best Kinks album I’ve heard yet. Really interesting from song to song. Variety of song here was key too as you had rockers, psychedelic and pop. Waterloo Sunset closer was a great way to close out the album.

This sounds like what people who dislike The Beatles say The Beatles sound like. Waterloo Sunset is perfect though.

The Kinks have never been my favourite 60s British band, they have a load of brilliant songs but many more average ones. This album ends with my favourite of the lot, Waterloo Sunset is a brilliant piece but it takes a good while to get there.

I was, despite my best efforts, pretty charmed by this album. I do think a lot of their sounds is VERY inspired by the Beatles, as was everyone, but I think there's still a lot to like here. There's some weird sounds, but even when they're a little more psychedelic or weird they're writing pretty catchy melodies. It has its rough moments (see Afternoon Tea), but honestly I had a really fun time with this. Favorites: Harry Rag, Love Me Till the Sun Shines, Waterloo Sunset

I like The Kinks. This isn't my favourite of theirs though

What an amazing album

60s British Invasion music, a little folk, rock, a little of what would become punk. It's not bad, but wasn't something that excited me much.

I’m running out of nice things to say about The Kinks. They’re good. So is this album.

Nice bit

OK, men ikke Kinks på sitt beste synes jeg

It’s not bad but can’t help comparing them to The Beatles.

Per dad, “that’s some obscure stuff!” (As someone who said, of the Kinks, “love love love” 😂 thanks algorithm, for the new street cred with my dad) That said, I’m not entirely sold! Inconsistent degrees of liking this, sometimes they feel like… idk their mouths are being stretched in an uncomfortable way like I do while singing dramatically and slowly when I’m crashing out in bad traffic

It sure sounds like the Kinks...

Very whimsical of course, but I think after hearing a few of their albums from this list, I can safely say I'd be good just sticking with compilations or playlists when it comes to these guys.

I kinda love this even though it has nothing much going on. Sweet melodies and lyrics based on witty observational little Dubliners-esque characters. Ray Davies has such an adorable voice. It was difficult to digest some of the pro summer propaganda in a few songs (I'm from India) but I'll let it pass. Mellow out, gaze at the waterloo sunset and just chill!

Kinky

This was a nice surprise. You can really hear the through-line to Blur.

Like if the Beatles made an album made up exclusively of Ringo songs.

Always love something kinky

Waterloo Sunset is such a banger.

The opposite of front loading an album.

I wish it was the 60s

Not s'bad.

Bad

Not too bad!

Justo lo opuesto…tienen un estilo propio y suenan super variado entre canciones. Muy atrapados en ese momento 60

Had this for many years. My Cd copy has a number of excellent bonus tracks (including the brilliant Autumn Almanac) but I only listened to the original tracks this time. Ray Davies is quite a songwriter. The best tracks on this album are another level. Waterloo Sunset may just be the most perfect pop song ever written...the equal of anything The Beatles did. Death of a Clown is also exceptional. David Watts, Love me Till The Sun Shines .....I also like Two Sisters. Didn't quite make 5 stars as it does occasionally meander into filler territory but still a great album. Favourite track (and one of the best tracks ever by anyone!!) Waterloo Sunset!

Klinkt een beetje als The Beatles, maar dan net iets minder strak en zuiver. Verder prima te luisteren. Lekker vrolijk en melodieus.

War gut aber im vergleich zum Rest hat nicht so auf mich gewirkt

Liked it, but nothing special. I do like the Kinks, and this was a very long time ago. Reminded me somewhat of kind of a Beatles lite. Anyway - hopefully more Ray Davies headed our way at some point.

I didn’t hate this, but it’s reminiscent of what I consider The Beatles’s War Crime Songs TM. Not bad, but a bit of a snooze fest.

Not to kink shame, but this album is pretty average.

It’s like if a Beatles album was all Ringo songs but kind of boring. Rounding up from a 2.5.

I respect The Kinks for being SO CLOSE to accidentally inventing punk rock in the early 60s, but I’ll be really honest… I've died a little bit inside hearing how bland and psych-rock they became. And how much they were trying to be The Beatles here, especially by “Tin Soldier Man” or “Situation Vacant”, they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. Sure, this was probably just ‘the sound’ in 1967 - kinda like how every female pop singer tries to write breakup songs with oddly specific but universal lyrics like Taylor Swift right now. Nobody thinks about it, it’s just what you have to do. I guess I can forgive them some degree of mimicry. This carries over into their next album but at least that one shows signs that they're trying to fight it. Anyway, I guess my overall critique of The Kinks is that I want more of 1964’s Kinks and less of this softer, lamer, late 60s psych rock band they turned into. Vanilla ain't the brand, guys!

Folky shit

ook zonder veel hits blijft deze Kinks overeind

I feel like in my journey through this list I have come across several bands that play this style of 60s rock/psych rock, but don't do it well, so its refreshing when I hear it done well. Most of those other albums have a tendency to have their songs blend together in terms of sound and structure. The Kinks manage it to keep it interesting with a lot of diverse sounds and ideas across the (exactly) 37 minute run time. Not all of it hits for me, but I found this album overall to be a fun and enjoyable experience. 4/5

# Album Name: Something Else By The Kinks # Artist: kinks # Rating: 3/5 # Comments: Distinctly average. it didnt grip me like how i would have expected. # Top Tunes: David watts / afternoon tea / waterloo sunset # Would I listen to it again? hmmmmm, ill come back to it

ахуенна

Classics. These guys set the bar high. God Bless The Kinks!

Another great album that surprised me with the straight through listenability.

Wow. This era of the Kinks is great. It’s like peak McCartney songwriting - simple, nostalgic, beautiful, character-based pop songs about real people living real lives - without Lennon making it pretentious or Harrison hippie-fying it. I had heard “Waterloo Sunset” dozens of times before and never got the hype for it, but in the context of this album it makes more sense. Something Else By The Kinks Is a perfect companion piece to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and I think it’s just as good. Having finally understood why everyone else likes the Kinks as much as they do has been one of the major benefits to me of doing this project.

A very under rated group of the 60s. 2 great songs on here Death of a Clown by guitarist Dave Davies whi only penned a few songs as brother Ray Davies wrote the bulk of their songs including one of their best Waterloo Sunset. They gave a snapshot of English life in their music.

cripes why are the Kinks on this list so much? I cant fathom that they are this revered in music circles unless I really am out of the loop. Its that weird jaunty British rock that definitely works in some places, and it can be creative at times. It verges on more fun than unenjoyable at least, although it can be a real balancing act sometimes, it felt like alternating tracks in quality. Perfect example, Death of a Clown being followed up by Two Sisters. The songwriting here is interesting enough, but I cant agree that The Kinks needed so many entries on the list in the first place.

4 albums by the Kinks is ridiculous. That’s as many as Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, U2, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd and Talking Heads. That’s more than the Beach Boys, Rush and Kendrick Lamar. There’s absolutely no way these British lads are influential enough to justify their placement on this list. There’s nothing about this album that makes it stand out. It sounds like what the Beatles must sound like to people who hate The Beatles

Who made this one

7 - GOOD

Storytellers the like of which we didn't see again until Arctic Monkeys (at least from what I've heard). Utterly brilliant.

Few memorable songs, Waterloo sunset so good, Situation Vacant really cool vocal inflections, other songs average

Creative use of space, melody, harmonies. Lots to enjoy here!

Not interesting

Pretty fun and good vibes

I enjoyed this much more on this relisten! ‘David Watts’ and ‘Death Of A Clown’ open the album well, and ‘Tin Soldier Man’ and ‘Situation Vacant’ have really grown on me from my previous listen. It obviously closes with the masterpiece ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and it’s safe to say that it’s one of The Kinks’ greatest tracks! This is definitely top 3 albums by The Kinks for me!

The Kinks are the least appreciated band of the British invasion. Everyone knows the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Clapton and his bands, but I’ve mentioned the Kinks to countless people that didn’t know who I was talking about. As much as I like them, however, this album doesn’t do much to build them up. I like it, it’s ok, but compared to other stuff of theirs, it’s just ok.