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.

The Fall - 'Live at the Witch Trials' (I.R.S.)

Whenever you evaluate the first release of an extremely prolific artist, it's a bit interesting to think about how there were no guarantees they would ever release any more records. What if this had been it? The Fall's first album is certainly not their best, but it's mostly great, and certainly sets the pace for what's to come. Yet the most interesting thing about it, maybe, is that it's the first of so many. All of the things are in place here by the end of the first song - the driving sound of indie future, Smith's sneering mockery with extemporaneous asides, something vaguely approaching pop form - and I can only think about what these young kids must have been like to spend time with. Certainly when bashing out 'Frightened' in some Mancunian garage, there was no certainty that 33 years later they'd be an institution, with countless albums, songs, and members. The Fall are an interesting band culturally, as I've meet lots of other casual Fall fans like myself, and we're all capable of being devoted to one particular era of the band without even dabbling in the others. I remember meeting a Fall fan whose expertise was in the Frenz Experiment era, and they had no idea what Perverted by Language sounded like -- just as I've never heard Extricate or I Am Kurious Oranj (though I'm sure they are fine records). To really sink into all 58 albums or whatever it is (72 according to discogs) requires a strength I just do not have. So I always stuck to the first handful, figuring they were the most influential and therefore the best (an arrogant assumption, for sure). Witch Trials has at least one all-time classic ('Rebellious Jukebox') and some underrated gems, such as the title track, a loose noodling sketch that serves more as an introduction to the perfect 'Futures and Pasts'. The presence of keyboards, even primitive ones, definitely separates them from Sham 96 or the Clash; they are haunting bells on 'Two Steps Back', a druggy moon hanging over the bleak 'Industrial Estate's of the North. Is this pure poetry, the birth of a new lyrical prophet? Or just another 'everything + the kitchen sink' art-school project? What I found so curious is that during my years living in Britain (2005-2008), all of the local bands still sounded like early Fall, though more like 'No Xmas for John Quays' than any of the messier bits. Whether this was direct inspiration or filtered through a few microgenerations, I'm not sure, but M.E. Smith is still royalty to a lot of people and there's not much sign that his geyser has slowed down since this.