The big uneasy
King Kink mines the Americana seam yet again. By James McNair.
Ray Davies ★★★ Our Country: Americana Act II LEGACY. CD/DL/LP
“BASICALLY, I’VE realised I’m very competitive,” Ray Davies told this writer in 2009, and he’s certainly been burnishing his legacy in the interim. We’ve had musicals, memoirs, a performance of All Day And All Of The Night with Metallica, a turn at the London Olympics and a choralpop album of Kinks classics with the Crouch End Festival Chorus. If the 73-yearold were to announce a graphic novel take on 1982 single Come Dancing, no one would be particularly surprised. Last year’s Americana – Davies’ first alloriginal solo work in a decade – scratched another important itch, and now comes Act II, the Kink once again backed by rootsy dreamteam The Jayhawks. As jump jive track Back In The Day flags-up with its props to Kay Starr and Eddie Cochran, ‘50s and ‘60s American pop culture still offers fruitful transport to Davies.
But like Americana and his 2013 book Americana: The Kinks, The Road And The Perfect Riff, this record also explores Davies’s US adventures as touring act or intermittent resident, and his love/hate relationship with the place. “I met her at a meet and greet after a show in Minneapolis-St Paul,” he recounts during gritty garage rock outing The Take. It’s presumably The Jayhawks’ Karen Grotberg who personifies the slightly clichéd, part-Scandinavian ice queen who sings “I’m gonna fuck me an icon tonight!” in her best Chrissie Hynde drawl. Elsewhere, too, the album’s decent but superfluous reworking of Oklahoma USA from 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies, and lovely Brit-band interloper narrative The Invaders trade on a certain theatricality. “They called us the invaders,” notes Davies in the latter, perhaps denouncing the US’s more hawkish tendencies. Over 18 tracks, things impress most in the home straight. It was in New Orleans in 2004 that Davies was shot in the leg while pursuing thieves who’d stolen his girlfriend’s purse, and at least four songs here are directly or indirectly inspired by eventful times in The Big Easy. There’s March Of The Zombies, which slinks with jazzy horns, and dark carnival The Big Weird, which find Davies out of sorts and in the Lola-esque company of “big strong men in party frocks”. The wistful spoken-word of The Big Guy, meanwhile, addresses the shooting directly, Davies lamenting the absence of the various burly minders that kept The Kinks safe back in the day. There are some hammy moments on Americana Act II, but Davies’ status as one of pop’s great storytellers endures. Good, too, to see the leader of that most British of British invasion bands finally turn his gaze back to Blighty, as he does on Crouch End Festival Chorus-bolstered opener, Our Country. He’s a Muswell Hillbilly, not a Beverly one, after all…