Muswell Hillbillies

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Two Sisters", "God's Children", "Better Things", "Oklahoma USA": the Kinks have the most tunes that bring a tear to my eye. Mostly, Muswell Hillbillies operates in a state of exaggerated calamity where pain meets the funny bone. Lavender Lane” (no relation to the 1967 song “Lavender Hill”) is an oddity, revisiting the “Terry meets Julie” vocal melody of “ Waterloo Sunset” but jazzing it up in a New Orleans arrangement.

Muswell Hillbillies - Rolling Stone

But then stand outside Ray Davies’s childhood home for a moment, and try to calculate its interior dimensions. The singer says that "they're gonna try and make [him] change [his] way of living, but they'll never make [him] something that [he's] not," likely referring to the government. It also has an antiquated style, mostly attributed to the fact that the entire album was recorded with ten-year-old equipment.

Davies adopts different voices, including a tragicomic Bolanesque bleat, to articulate each character’s plight (alcoholism; a prison sentence; a once-fat woman fallen victim to anorexia), while The Kinks, with Dave Davies on dobro and slide guitar, allow influences from pre-war American popular music to infiltrate their famously English sound. Most of the music-hall style songs come over pretty well, even if the genre is minor compared to things the Kinks have done in the past. The charming demo “Nobody’s Fool”, meeting us in a familiar Soho, sounds like a Percy outtake but was in fact a theme tune for the ITV series Budgie. A previous Kinks album had used the village green as a symbol of a nostalgic Eden (and another had portrayed Australia as a pot of gold for emigrating Brits), but a move to Muswell Hill – the conceptual glue holding the 12 songs on this 1971 LP together – seems in Ray’s eyes to represent a defeat for the working class, a victory for bureaucracy and the fracturing of a way of life. Both Rockways, but one has the pocket for the record on the right side of the gatefold, the other has the pocket on the left side.

Muswell Hillbilly - Wikipedia Muswell Hillbilly - Wikipedia

The Kinks who roared out of Muswell Hill in 1964 with “Long Tall Sally,”“You Do Something To Me,” and (finally) “You Really Got Me” weren’t any shuffling hillbillies, they were grade-A urban brats: and they later matured in a way encompassing broadened scope and sensibilities that few rock bands have ever matched. A portion of it is fine, but some of the songs are so positively uninspired and unenergetic it drives me up the wall. Muswell Hillbilly" was first released on the Muswell Hillbillies album in 1971, where it was the twelfth and final track. Never seen New Orleans, Oklahoma, Tennessee, [but] still I dream of the Black Hills that I ain't never seen.At least five songs could be described as this type, and when the country-ish material is added, the two styles account for almost the whole LP. Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault] Now That We Don’t Talk (Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault] “Slut! As must be obvious by now to anyone who has ever encountered a true-blue rabid Kinks fan, each new Kinks album is an Officially Sanctioned major event, even in these post- Village Green Preservation Society/ Arthur days. In the edit page, go to the 'Metadata' tab and add your Juno artist, label or release page for listeners to purchase your release / releases. Muswell Hillbillies was the band's first album for RCA Records, [2] their prior recordings having been released on Pye Records ( Reprise Records in the United States).