The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)

If you haven't heard this album, you really should. The Kinks have a reputation, thanks to their biggest hits, of being a band that plays hard and fast, but the late 1960's were a quiet, more pastoral-sounding time for the band. In 1966, a U.S. travel ban combined with Ray Davies's having a nervous breakdown, set the band on a trajectory far different from their fellow British Invasion peers. Themes of tea, tobacco and British-ness in general dominated their albums of the late 1960's, all of which are now critically acclaimed, but at the time were miserable financial failures. This album represents the peak of these themes, pulled together in a loose concept album.

For landmark albums such as this I only accept the finest, which in this case is a 3 disc uber-deluxe edition, a mostly-noble attempt to bring together every track even remotely associated with the recording of this album. In total there are 62 tracks, which I think sets the record for amount of bonus tracks if you consider that for some the original album was only 12 tracks (though 15 was more standard).

Part of the reason this version is so massive for the sake of a single album is its complicated release history. The band recorded enough material for two albums, but something got mangled along the way and a few different editions (in stereo and glorious mono) popped up around the world. Attempts to collect the assorted variants have resulted in a bunch of CD editions of varying quality. My old copy slapped together the 15 track mono version with the 12 track stereo version, plus a mono version of the (sometimes) accompanying single, "Days". The problems with this version was numerous, with a song like "Mr. Songbird" being stereo-only and another like "Animal Farm" only in mono. This set eliminates all of that nonsense and does mono and stereo versions of every song. During this time, a number of oddball tracks were recorded that either never received a proper release or ended up on the bizarro Great Lost Kinks Album in the early 1970's. They round all of those tracks up here, which is nice, although I think a couple still remain under wraps. Also included, but not really essential, are alternate mixes of some of the regular Village Green tracks and some songs that were previously bonus tracks from other albums that got pulled into the orbit of this version ("Wonderboy" and "Polly" are from Something Else By the Kinks, "King Kong" from Arthur). I guess replication is better than elimination!

This album represented the end of the first era of Kinks history, with bassist Pete Quaife leaving the band for good and the band pursuing a heavier sound in the albums to come, all the while continue to advance various themes, some better defined than others.