CD Review: Ray Davies - Other People's Lives - Page 3

While the nonchalant upper-crust drawl and musical crawl of the fish-out-of-water tale of “The Tourist” is spurred along by a flavoring of this musical amalgamation and a rock-rousing bridge, the more successful of Davies’ American-style departures is the melodically, lyrically and vocally haunting “Getaway” with its spacious Ry Cooder-esque instrumentation and Neil Young quaver (yes, I know Young is from Canada, but he’s lived here long enough to be an honorary American quaverer, at least). The brooding mournfulness evokes mystery trains and the romantic, quintessential American yearning for escape, moving on, and new possibilities: “And is the shadow on the sidewalk someone like you? / In the blink of an eye waving goodbye / It’s time you made your getaway.”

In the familiar vein of Kinks-size societal slicing and dicing, Davies, with the uproarious title song, updates his take on tabloid-type sleaze by including the internet in the ongoing world wide web of deceit's design to “Spread the news, scandalized / Words cut like a thousand knives.” As Davies succinctly sums up in his understated manner, “I can’t believe what I just read, excuse me I just vomited.” Speaking of speaking, Davies’ voice is in better, more expressive form than ever on this solo CD. The best proof of this shows up in “That’s That (Stand Up Comic)” in which Davies, in a song and a cockney-style vaudevillian vocal that could’ve been lifted from one of the highly-theatrical ’70s Kinks' concept albums, announces that "I’m the lowest common denominator, and this is all about your culture," while seemingly skewering both boorish mediocrity and rarefied pretentiousness at the same time:

Jack the lad has become Oscar Wilde and the followers of style way it’s the latest thing
William Shakespeare is the schmooze of the week and any one who says different is a fucking antique
And Noel Coward has become very hard and the comic says bollocks and everyone laughs.

That’s that. Style I mean. Never was much never has been
But the little bit that was was all that we had
And the clown does a fart and everybody farts back.

Nothing on the essentially darkly and and darkly humored Other People’s Lives is as infectiously exuberant as, say, Arthur’s “Victoria,” and though there is nothing as all-out gorgeous and wistful as “Waterloo Sunset,” "Celluloid Heroes" or "Oklahoma, USA," the album’s stand-out, “Over My Head,” comes closest in expressing a heart and humanity that, while perhaps concerning some other people's lives, surely must at the same time encompass his own. It's everyman's universality, with the understood need to scramble about for refuge and momentary escape from overwhelming strife and stress. “Everyday is a day is a day at a time at a step by step / Hit a wall took a fall to a new depth,” Davies laments, before segueing into a memorably soaring refrain of melodic and vocally visceral impact:

In a world that is close to breaking thought that you were my friend
It’s a world that is full of hating and about to descend
But I smile and pretend.
I’m a million miles away from it all and let it go right over my head
Let ‘em chase and the winner take all
And let it go right over my head . . .

Davies may prefer, as most of us do, to “smile and pretend,” But “Over My Head” is a song that undercuts, redeems or puts to right many of the album’s seeming cynicism or caustic tone, no matter how justified, and provides a nice capper to his first forty years as one of the best and most consistent songwriters and musical craftsmen in rock and pop. Indeed, whether storyteller or self-confessional chronicler, Davies is indeed "not like everybody else." Now if we can just keep him from chasing after purse snatchers . . .

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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