Hard it may be to remove Hot Fuzz from your mind on a run-through of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, it must be done. Iconic the moment Nicolas Angel runs through the village square may be, it is likely not what The Kinks had in mind when they kick-started a run of their all-time best works. Face to Face and Something Else preceding this mean The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is the third successive thrill, and what a time it is. The band had hit the ground running after Kinkdom and showed no signs of letting up with that quintessential Britishness, which also hid within it a biting criticism on the streets they traipsed. Their influence on Blur can be found here more than anywhere else in their discography. That twee spirit is what runs through The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and that’s the sort of tone the band would keep with the rest of their careers. Varying degrees of success, and arguably never one as good as this.
They’d found an instrumental style that suited them, and nobody was quite making this tone. The Rolling Stones were chasing after The Beatles and The Kinks were in the middle ground, finding their own course through just with a little less success than the other two bands. It’s a tone that is pushed to its very limit on this album, with Picture Book a relatively repetitive piece. But it’s a showcase of how The Kinks could use those romantic foundations to do something so much more with the genre. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society would showcase this as much as it could, and it works great. A very consistent album considering how limited the instrumental appeal can sometimes be. Harmonising interjections and a steady chord progression is charming enough to work for one or two, but it’s the lyrical nuance that needs to do the heavy lifting later.
Last of the Steam Powered Trains is one of the many unique commentaries The Kinks pull. Not because of the focus or the instrumentals, but because of how they blur the two. Whether The Kinks believed they had outlived their usefulness as the steam powered train had at the time is irrelevant to the point of the song. They’re singing of an old England which to many now never existed anyway, but it’s a preservation of an idyllic view of a nasty time. How far your enjoyment of The Kinks’ work here depends on your enjoyment of psychedelic commentaries elsewhere. Big Sky is the best test of this, a song which has the usual instrumentals by The Kinks but brings about a flowing, somewhat liberated sense. It’s getting out of the city, the country, even the transport and focuses on whatever is beyond. Hippie fundamentals, but there’s nothing wrong with a quick dose of that with The Kinks.
What the band does best though is found in the songs to follow. Sitting by the Riverside implies some calmer charms but it’s anything but. Animal Farm has George Orwell to thank, naturally, and if it were not obvious by that point in the album, the intent of The Kinks’ writing is made clear. They’re not exactly delighted by the world around them and are putting it to rights, the cobbled lanes and sun shining in the sky is worthy of criticism just as the smoke-filled cities are. Those criticisms are clear as ever and still shine through now because little has changed about how people view the United Kingdom. There is still a cling to this idyllic, post-war feeling that apparently spread across the country. Documents of it like The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society are fantastic examples of how that was, to a degree, mythology. Musically fantastic, and lyrically biting work from the band was no surprise at this point, but there are still a few brilliant moments.
