The Kinks “Word of Mouth”
In my tweens, a casual Kinks fan then, I remember seeing the cassette for “Word of Mouth” floating around the bargain bins at the mall. The cover was ghastly, desperately insisting this original British Invasion band was as modern as Duran Duran. It had some Rauchenberg-esque pink lips on it, yellow swooshes — a pop art eyesore. Until this year, I had only heard the two singles from the album: “Do it Again,” an inarguably catchy piece of Pop Rock from a band that had, for years, released albums and toured the world on spin cycle, and “Living on a Thin Line,” a thick piece of post-empire, spooky Britannia and one of Dave Davies’ best.
I’d never read anything positive about this album (I’ve since found a few exceptions, but it took some effort). It was made as the Kinks were splitting from their drummer Mick Avory, and the famously combative brothers were at a low point, both heading off to solo projects. “Word of Mouth” has been described as chasing after trends, as containing production that sounds pinched and compressed, even by the worst of 1980’s standards. It is said the songs are forgettable. I DISSENT! “Word of Mouth” does not have a musical problem, it has a marketing problem. If it were marketed as “College Rock” (as we called it then), released on IRS or Twin-Tone alongside the Replacements and REM, instead of sharing oxygen with Corey Hart, it would have found it’s audience.
“Word of Mouth” is an economical album, full of idiosyncratic Pop without a single bad track. Yes, the sound is thin. There’s no bottom. But it’s also crisp and bright. My addiction to the album began with the guitar sound on the title track — tight, crunchy, coiled. It sounds a good deal like Hüsker Dü to me. Listening to it felt like scratching an itch, initially irritating, then strangely pleasurable. Dave Davies famously took a razor blade to his little green amp to make the guitar sound of “You Really Got Me”. What blade made this sound?
Three tracks into “Word of Mouth,” on “Good Day,” we get a full dose of Ray’s wit on a bad day play by play delivered over a sing-song rhythm:
Holes in my socks and I can't find my shoes.
It's no surprise that I'm singing the blues.
So many holes in my life still to mend,
And someone just said that the world's gonna end.
Pairing small holes in socks with the apocalypse, Ray has such an understated charm. His writing is melancholy but never morose, intelligently resigned, but not defeated. Fellow Brit Elvis Costello has all the intelligence of Ray, but can give into snark or slip into an erudite mode that blocks identification. Where Costello can feel strained, Davies is easy. They both have the same bent angle at writing, but with Davies you don’t need a dictionary to play along. Moreover, Davies carries within him a utopia that’s nothing to sneer about it.
Melodically, “Good Day” nurses you along by withholding. Davies has a way of choosing the note at the end of a line that holds the tension in the tune rather than resolving it. There’s certainly a technical name for this, but I’m a fan, not a musician. All that withholding of resolution, gives the bridge of this song, which does the opposite, the power of hope. Like some of Davies’ best work, “Good Day” manages to be cynical and sincere.
Davies is a master of balance, and interesting juxtapositions. “Summer is Gone,” a bouncy, Beach Boys tinged song about loss and losing, strikes a similar despondent/hopeful contradiction. Like the man who made a song about mugging Santa Claus, he takes old topics at fresh angles. He did after all, write one of his catchiest songs ever about an Almanac (and rhymed it with his poor rheumatic back). In “Summer is Gone” behind the joy of summer is the girl you lost but the melody is so fun you can keep your head above water. In the third verse he even dredges up his parents' marriage, bratty kids, and various middle-age, past prime no-no’s for Rock n’ Roll. He’s a connoisseur of odd combinations — it’s a kind of “You Really Don’t Got Me Now” for an older band, and it still sparkles.
“Sold Me Out,” a rocker about professional betrayal, sounds like it was recorded in a garage, which in Rock is supposed to be a good thing. It’s got real anger in it, which after this many years in the business, I assume is earned. “Massive Reductions” is another of his peculiar upbeat tracks about the economy. There are a bunch of these on 1979s “Low Budget.” Dave would say he could only write about his own feelings, where his brother could write about anything. Case in point, Ray tackles inflation. The heavy synth on “Massive Reductions” gets criticized unfairly. It’s a song about modern turmoil using modern tools and they don’t drip into Depeche Mode. Rather, they use the synth much like a driving guitar riff. More interesting, is that “Massive Reductions” finds Davies transporting his voice into yet another character, which as his brother points out, was one of his real gifts. There’s a vitality in the album achieved from the variety of point of views it give us, and the variety of musical styles, all united by Ray’s wry humor and compassionate eye.
Dave’s second contribution “Guilty” takes off with a loud and pounding guitar beat, tearing through its four minutes of running time. It reminds us that these guys are the godfathers of metal as well as all the smart pop that followed in their wake. They are an unusually eclectic band. “Too Hot” has shades of calypso sock-hop? It’s an infectious idiosyncratic dance tune, that was apparently out of its time. I prefer it to their comeback hit “Come Dancing”. Would this have sold if Weezer did it in the 1990’s with some “Happy Days” clips over the video? It would be an interesting experiment to try to do some new cover art re-release this entire album under the title “The Shminks” and see if it gets discovered.
The gem of the album is “Missing Persons,” a “She’s Leaving Home” style tribute to a lost child told through the voice of her parents. Ray Davies was always an old soul. Having lost an older sister at a young age, you hear his well of loss in the earliest recordings. I do wonder though if his younger self had the wisdom to write the lines:
She's a missing person, I wish I could see
All of the places she might be
Maybe I stopped her from being free
Maybe there was something missing in me.
Do you need to be past prime for that kind of introspection?