As a friend once told me, songwriting is like a muscle. It gains strength through constant exercise, while failing to use it can cause 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 twenty 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 also uneven is almost inevitable. A dozen years after the last time Davies tried this (and more than twice that number 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 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 real thing.
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 opening “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 Oasis-like rumble that shoulders more weight than is apparent on first listen. His voice is older than we’ve ever heard it, but it’s still strong and unmistakably Davies, both conversational and resolutely British as he declares, “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 spirited, yet often workmanlike adult-contemporary fare like “Creatures Of Little Faith,� “Run Away From Time,� and the Stax-lite “Thanksgiving Day.� He occasionally trips himself up on present-day concerns, such as the awkward invocation of “Living La Vida Loca� during his condemnation of the oblivious colonial mindset of “The Tourist.� The clumsy title track is an update of “20th Century Man� (and there’s an ironic concept for you) that’s quite explicitly anti-internet and anti-tabloid culture. 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, “Stand Up Comic,� on which he declares, “Welcome to Jolly Old England� with a pronounced Cockney accent and a punky, jazzy music-hall backing. This sets 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 with a lone acoustic guitar accompanying Davies’s voice, and gives the impression that 35 years are just melting away. It’s an evocation of the past, rather than an invocation of it, at least until the band comes in to turn it into standard contemporary AAA radio fare. In those first few moments, if you pay close enough attention, you can catch Ray Davies flexing.
