Albums

Album Review: Ray Davies

Album: Working Man’s Café
Label: V2

Ray Davies, the proverbial London bus. We wait forty years for an album by one of our greatest singer-songwriters and then two come along at once. This is the second of his solo albums and he’s adopted the trend of giving it away free with the Sunday broadsheet – some may say a rather devaluing, tacky gesture.

This new album finds Ray in a particularly reflective mood. It almost sounds like a swansong as he feeds us lines like “If this should be the last time” and “Is this the final station”. Imaginary Man is a particularly good example of this as he reminisces on his own life and the passage of time. It has slow, subtle rhythms so as not to detract from his talent for pin-pointing his feelings with an eloquent line. What’s different from his Kinks days is the adoption of all-things American. On half the songs there’s even a twang of the accent in there – particularly on Vietnam Cowboys, which jollies along, all purdy-like, as it explores the phenomenon of the globalisation of individual cultures. His vocal, despite the tendency to drift between cockney and yankee, has surprisingly taken on elements of Knopfler, Bowie and Lennon. He’s also not averse to ramping it up into a roar, when something particularly irks him, giving some of the songs a rockier edge. Mainly though, the album is a little bland and lacking in diversity – it meanders lazily through a blues and country soundscape.

There are definite highlights, however, such as You’re Asking Me and the sentimental title-track, which both sound as if they could have been lifted straight from a Kinks album. Another stand-out track is The Voodoo Walk with its Chris Rea-like driving rhythm. The lyrics cover the topic of insomnia and the music features a nightmarish sequence of dark chords ending in howling feedback. It’s songs like these that remind us just how much we’ve missed the legend and remain hopeful that this isn’t the swansong after all.

Band link = Ray Davies
For fans of: The Kinks, Mark Knopfler, David Bowie

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Review commissioned by Music-Zine.

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