Ray Davies
Other People’s Lives (V2)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, January-February 2006

As a friend once told me, songwriting is a muscle. It gains strength through constant exercise, while failing to use it causes it to wither and atrophy. By that reckoning, Ray Davies should be a 98-pound weakling on Other People’s Lives. It’s not only his first studio album as a solo artist in 20 years, it’s the first new material that he’s released in any context since 1993, when the Kinks ground to an unsatisfying halt with Phobia.

That Other People’s Lives is better than Phobia is a massive relief. That it’s uneven is almost inevitable. A dozen years after the last time he tried this (and more than twice that since his powers could be called formidable), he’s a man out of practice, and the effect is akin to watching a former all-star working out on the field in an effort to get back into fighting trim: flashes of his former brilliance pop up every now and then, but you’d never mistake it for the big game.

But Davies was indeed one of the all-time greats, and if he can’t be expected to duplicate the output of his ’67-’72 peak, or even the warm-up and cool-off years just before and after, it’s still a kick to hear the guy back in it and fighting. The starting “Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After)” both updates and sidesteps the formula upon which he made his name, as feedback-laden guitars and crisp drums peal out a minor-key Oasisian rumble that shoulders more weight than is apparent on first listen. His voice is older than we’ve ever heard it, but it’s strong and still unmistakably Davies, conversational and resolutely British as he stands firm to declare “We must dig inside and crawl outside ourselves/I will/I bloody well will/Things are gonna change.”

Change, of course, is something that Davies has spent entire albums fighting off tooth and nail, and there are signs all over Other People’s Lives that he’d prefer not to abandon his past if he can get away with it. The steam-powered but somewhat rusty “The Getaway (Lonesome Train)” reaches its epiphany “on a sunny afternoon,” while “Is There Life After Breakfast?” acknowledges the simple pleasures of a “cuppa tea” and features a “Lola”-styled acoustic guitar that wanders in and out. The quiet futility of “Next Door Neighbour,” meanwhile, could be easily mistaken for a lost Arthur outtake if it had only been recorded with the same technological limitations that the Kinks faced in 1969.

When Davies steps forward into the present, the result is often spirited, workmanlike adult-contemporary fare like “Creatures Of Little Faith,” “Run Away From Time” and the Stax-lite “Thanksgiving Day,” but he occasionally trips himself up on more up-to-date concerns. He awkwardly invokes “Living La Vida Loca” while condemning the obliviously colonial mindset of “The Tourist,” but he’s clumsiest in the title track. An update of “20^th Century Man” (and there’s an ironic concept for you), it’s quite explicitly anti-internet and anti-tabloid culture, and the target of its mockery is just a little too easy for one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most astute social critics, the man who gave us “Shangri-La” and “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion.” It doesn’t help that it contains, in “I can’t believe what I just read/Excuse me, I just vomited,” one of the most horrible lines of his otherwise esteemed career.

Davies makes up for that lapse in the very next song. “Welcome to Jolly Old England,” he declares in “Stand Up Comic,” with a pronounced Cockney accent and a punky Georgie Fame groove setting up a spirited jape about the deterioration of culture that would owe a great deal to Parklife-era blur if the latter didn’t so obviously mine the ground Davies was covering three decades earlier for inspiration. Other People’s Lives is at its best on “All She Wrote,” which starts out with a verse, featuring just acoustic guitar and Davies’s voice, that sounds like 35 years is just melting away. It’s an evocation of the past, rather than an invocation of it, until the band comes in, at which point it becomes contemporary enough to be played on AAA radio without getting stuck there. And right then, if you pay close enough attention, you can catch Davies flexing.

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