Ray Davies – Americana review: ‘a star-spangled success’

The Kinks legend goes transatlantic in the first half of a double-album project
Part one: Ray Davies is back with the first half of a double concept album
Jim Dyson/Getty
Rick Pearson21 April 2017

With his ballads about village greens and Waterloo sunsets, Ray Davies has always been the most quintessentially British of singer-songwriters.

But his latest album, the first part of a double concept album, sees him cast his eyes across the pond to the US.

Davies has had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with the country. The Kinks were banned from playing in the US in 1965 after Davies punched a union official, and a few years later he was shot in the leg in New Orleans chasing a mugger.

On The Deal – a sneering 21st-century update on The Kinks’s Dedicated Follower of Fashion — it sounds like the 72-year-old is still carrying a grudge.

Thankfully, the album blossoms into a more generous affair. The Great Highway is a soft-rockin’ love letter to the open road; A Place In Your Heart is a dewy-eyed duet with the Jayhawks’s Karen Grotberg.

All in all, it’s something of a star-spangled success. Bring on the next instalment.

(Sony)

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