The Kinks - The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society

Change is hard, and gets harder all the time. Change ebbs and flows around you, and you constantly have to ebb and flow along with it, or drop out and encapsulate yourself against the outside world. Much pop music made mourns love lost, but not a world lost, and innocence lost that is never to be recaptured. The 60s especially embraced a world full of life and change, and a dropping out of old patterns in favor of the new and novel. To make an album about a slower, older world, a world more akin to Albion than a modern UK, would seem like career suicide in the 1968. And, indeed, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society was one of the final steps that took the band from the cutting edge of fame to yesterday's news.But, as truly inspired music often is, the world overlooked a great work with this one. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is a concept album in the truest sense: lead singer/primary songwriter/major creative force of the band Ray Davies worked, wheted and incubated his "Village Green" for over two years, weathering a changing musical scene, turmoil within the band, and a record label who, while catering to his whims, desired a hit machine. The "Village Green" repsresented simpler times in his life, before the pressures fame and stardom, when, as he sings in "Picture Book", he would "holiday in August...in sunny South France" with his momma and poppa and Uncle Charlie, or dream of conquering the world with his childhood Walter. The 15 tracks of The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society perfectly define "nostalgia": a longing for the past.The opening three tracks ("Village Green Preservation Society", "Do You Remember Walter?", and "Picture Book") chart out the course for the album. We won't be looking forward here. Only in the past were we happy, and the stark realizations that come from this will serve to make us miserably pine for what we can no longer have. You can never go home again, the saying goes. But that doesn't stop us (and our memories) from trying. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is an album that grows richer and more poignant with age, as that picture book becomes just a bit thicker and the times behind seems to grow longer than the times ahead.The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society contains from musical gems, from songs like "Last of the Steam-Power Trains" playing like an old r&b track, to "Phenominal Cat" and "Wicked Annabella" touching psychedelic rock. There isn't any fat on this album; every track fits and works, and builds upon the theme of yester-time. The Kinks, and Davies in particular, would never really recover from Village Green Preservation Society, but each passing year vindcates their choice to eschew fame for art.