Kinks - 'Face to Face' (Pye/Zafiro)

When I lived in Scotland, someone once drunkenly ranted at me about how annoying they found the American music hipster fascination with the Kinks, particularly their more English-empire themed material. This may have been a case of a Scottish guy feeling irritated with something so English as to be almost like musical imperialism, so I understood it, but there's also the fact that local Glaswegians were buying Trinidad & Tobago football jerseys en masse that year, since they faced England in the same World Cup group, and that's when it just gets silly. The English have a lot of crimes to answer for, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson merely being the latest, but things are a bit more complicated than that, so I took with a grain of salt (though I perhaps slightly dialled back my outward passion for this music after that conversation). It's been a few years since I fell into a Kinks hole, but this section of the blog-project comes at a nice time, because these songs are brightening up the dark end of this winter, or at least they are tonight. Face to Face is the one where the truly GREAT run starts - I had all of them between this and Arthur on the Castle reissue CDs, which featured all of the right bonus tracks in the right places. And to be honest, I'd put the Face to Face - Muswell Hillbillies era up against any of the other unfuckwithable streaks in rock music history; maybe it doesn't quite equal, say, Propeller through Under the Bushes in terms of total amazement, but it comes close. And like GbV then, there's a plethora of non-album material that turned up over the years in various places (compilations, singles, etc.) which are part of the complete picture. So used to the CD am I that this LP feels a bit weak without 'This is Where I Belong' and 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else', but that's ok, cause I still have the CD (we're just way out of sync between the two blogs, sorry!). Comparing this to Kinda Kinks just a few albums back, the difference is remarkable - where the Kinks in 1965 were a singles band who padded out their album with some filler, just a year later they're creating near-complete statements of purpose. Even the lighter fare here - 'Holiday in Waikiki', 'Party Line', 'Session Man' - are great songs. There's a sense of drama that doesn't compromise the catchiness - 'Rainy Day in June' is positively epic, but when the chorus comes in, it's a slow and addictive march that shows messrs. Quaife and Avery as being so much more than just backing musicians. Track two, 'Rosy Won't You Please Come Home', is a work of heartbreaking beauty, though maybe I'm just a sucker for these family dramas. 'House in the Country' doesn't quite reach Village Green levels of pastoral nostalgia, but the seeds are sown. It's all bound up in Shel Talmy production again, so the guitars ring, the drums quake, and everything is more psychedelic than you might remember it being, with flourishes of harpsichord on 'Rosy', musique concrete overlays on 'Rainy Day', and Dave Davies' hard guitar edge starting to emerge (listen to that crazy tone on 'Waikiki'!).  No, it's not their best album, but it's undeniably solid throughout.