CD Review: Ray Davies - Other People's Lives - Page 2

Moreover, in the propulsive, hard-edged opener “The Morning After,” Davies questions the power of positive deluding with another throwback allusion. Singing that “we patch up the last disaster slower faster, crawl out through the door / and do it all again, but things have got to change” the narrator almost wills himself to change with an impassioned and snarled contention, fists to the sky, that “I will I bloody well will — things have got to change.” A false bravado, perhaps, but still evoking and upending the earlier “Do It Again,” from 1984’s Word of Mouth, wherein the more defeatist character lacks the courage of Other People’s ostensibly perseverant convictions: “And you think today is going to be better / Change the world and do it again / Give it all up and start all over / You say you will but you don't know when."

Is Davies’ glass half-full now? Not if you consider “After the Fall” as it poses the question, “what glass?”: “This time it was harder to get up than before / I cried to the heavens and the visions appeared / I cried ‘Can you help?’ It replied ‘Not all.’" In addition to featuring some beautiful "Waterloo Sunset"-tinged backing vocals, "Fall" is quite reminiscent of “Big Sky” from the classic The Village Green Preservation Society when a similar haughty and insouciant God also shrugged off a few responsibilities:

Big sky looked down on all the people who think they got problems
They get depressed and they hold their head in their hands and cry.
People lift up their hands and they look up to the big sky
But big sky is too big to sympathize
Big sky’s too occupied.

Ah, the ol' deistic ennui. On a more personal, down-to-earth level, things stay a little on the mocking and melancholy side even on the two winning songs, “The Tourist” and “The Getaway (Lonesome Train),” that resulted from Davies’ attempt to vary his usual themes. In an effort to shed a little “Godfather of Britpop” residue, Davies moved to New Orleans in 2000 to soak up the music he loved — Southern-style blues, country and jazz: “It was as though all of my American musical influences had been floated down the Mississippi from all over America and picked up other styles along the way until it ended up in New Orleans.”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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