You got me so I don't know what I'm doin'

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

21/03/65 : Kinks - The Kinks


Our fourth visit with The Kinks and it's been a very mixed bag so far, with none of them really hitting the spot for me, although our last visit (earlier this year) wasn't too bad - so there's at least some hope for this one.

Hmmm - it's an interesting one because they're definitely trying to find their style, which works better in some places than others. A lot of the time, they're just playing sub-Beatles or Stones stuff ("Bald Headed Woman" is particularly bad) but in other places there's a really edge to it ("Beautiful Delilah", "You Really Got Me") or some surprisingly tenderness ("Stop Your Sobbing", later covered by The Pretenders). It's an interesting listen, but feels like it would have benefited from a bit more "finding themselves" before being released. It's a pretty stylish album cover though - even if the spacing of the letters annoys me.

We're at #14 in the charts this week on their 24th week of a 25 week run with #3 being as high as it got in its eighth and seventeenth weeks. The top five this week were The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Sandie Shaw (which feels generous), Jim Reeves (ditto) and The Kinks (there was only five months between their first two albums) and we have three new entries this week for The Searchers (#16), The Pretty Things (#17) and Nat King Cole (#19) - which gives a good idea of the variety of music we've seen this year.

Wikipedia tells us this is yet another debut album for the year, but there's not a lot else there other than telling us it was called You Really Got Me in the US, building on the success of the single. Critically, AllMusic describes it as "inconsistent", which certainly seems fair to me but Consequence Of Sound makes the interesting case that it's "proto-punk", particularly on "Beautiful Delilah" (which is a Chuck Berry cover, who could also be considered "proto-punk") and I can see what they're saying. One last thing that pops up towards the bottom of the entry is that Jimmy Page played as a session musician on some of the tracks - it's weird how he went from this to Led Zep in just a few years.

"Customers also listened to" The Who, Small Faces, The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds - I can certainly hear bits of all of them throughout this. But, whilst it's good in places (and it certainly feels like it owes "You Really Got Me" a big debt) it's just a bit too much all over the place for me.

14/03/65 - Pretty decent
28/03/65 - Nicely different

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