A Review of Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King

A while ago in this blog, I reviewed a handful of books after reading only half of the texts of each. I can't remember exactly why I did that—maybe I wanted to do a thorough plot summary without giving away spoilers at the end—but this time around I held off and finished Sleeping Beauties, a novel by Stephen King and his son Owen King, before writing this review, and I am glad for that, for reasons that I will explain later.

Stephen King, his wife Tabitha, and his sons Owen and Joe (aka Joe Hill) are all published novelists. His daughter Naomi is a minister in the Unitarian Universalist church.

According to Owen, the Kings like to pitch story ideas to each other around the dinner table, which is something I would love to be around for. One day Owen came up with a pitch: what if all the women in the world fell asleep and wouldn't wake up? The elder King told him that this was an awesome idea, and father and son decided to collaborate on it.

I've read two other Stephen King novel collaborations, both of them with Peter Straub: The Talisman and Black House. The latter is the sequel to the former, written 16 years later. I feel that The Talisman is the superior book. Both novels were written via the same method: King would write a passage of around 75 pages or so, then he would send it to Straub, who would add a passage of around the same length, and then send it back to King, and so forth.

I could not tell who wrote which passages in The Talisman. I wasn't looking for that in the text. I was too entranced with the story and its dual worlds and the characters within them. In Black House, I thought that I could often tell which part was written by whom. Part of that was due to the story not being as strong, allowing my mind to wander and peek around backstage for the ropes and the wires and whatnot. The other part with Black House was that both authors repeatedly stuck the protagonist in a seemingly impossible pickle just before turning the story over to the other guy, who was then tasked with trying to pull him out of it.

I don't remember who started that, and I don't know how much of the gamesmanship was good natured and how much if it was passive aggression, but it was noticeable, and distracting, again in part because the story wasn't as good as it was in The Talisman.

Getting back to Sleeping Beauties: the collaboration between father and son here strikes me as seamless. Owen told his father to leave a "donut hole" in each passage for Owen to fill in. I'm not sure what that entailed, but after they got through the first draft, they would rewrite each other's work, which likely made it more difficult to distinguish between the co-authors.

To me, it reads like a Stephen King novel; it holds a lot of his old standard tropes: incarceration, men with anger issues, family drama, drug and alcohol abuse, and stuff getting blown up real good. It's hardly a Stephen King book without some big splosions, and this story comes through with an early meth lab blowout and plenty of late-story bazooka and C-4 action.

The only part where I might have detected another author was in the ending, and I put that forward because the ending is quite good. King—as I've noted before in other reviews—is not always great at endings. He rarely outlines his stories; instead, he writes as if he's watching his stories play out in real time, with King just reporting on what happens.

That style leads to little or no planning for endings, and sometimes that shows in the form of him ending things with one big explosion, followed by a low-key epilogue that checks in on the protagonist.

A few years before Sleeping Beauties came out, King asked his son Joe Hill for help with the ending of King's book 11/22/63, and that ending was pretty brilliant. So, by way of inference, I'm going to credit the satisfying ending of Sleeping Beauties to Owen, with apologies to the elder Mr. King.

If I had reviewed this book halfway through the story, as I'd done with the others, I would have given it a mediocre rating in relation to King's other books. So I'm glad that I waited, because the ending ties up the story rather nicely.

At the halfway point, I found that I had a problem with one of the main characters: Evie Black, an enigmatic Earth Mother demi-goddess who springs up in a small Appalachian town as an emissary of the mysterious force behind the world's women falling asleep and wrapping themselves in cocoons.

Last month, when I reviewed a mediocre film called Creator, I wrote about that movie's main character in terms of something I called Schrödinger's Demigod: a character who is an all-powerful badass wherever the plot needs them to be, and alternately a vulnerable pacifist wherever the plot needs them to be.

Sleeping Beauties' Evie Black shows every sign of being another Schrödinger's Demigod. After running a man's head through a metal mobile home wall with just the strength of her arms, she allows herself to be locked up in the local penitentiary, and soon afterwards she becomes vulnerable to capture or attack by the antagonists of the story, at least when she isn't selectively controlling the local wildlife to get her way.

But when I got to the ending, the story did a good job of explaining a motive behind Evie's alternating courses of action and inaction, and the plot details sort of clamped together retroactively, which is something that a good ending will do.

So, it's a good story. I would recommend it, unless you are someone who enjoys being outraged every day by things in entertainment being woke. The book addresses poverty, drug use, assault rifle (and bazooka) ownership, prison conditions, domestic violence, LGBTQ issues, men's issues, and women's issues, all somehow without becoming preachy and tiresome, which is a neat trick, and difficult to pull off.

A Review of "A Review of Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King" by Suitedjustice:

A review of "A Review of "A Review of Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King" by Suitedjustice" by ModSheep:

Thanks, Sheep! I love that gif.

Sure, but have you considered this?

Standing Beside the Horse That Threw Me

I've been a bit despondent and demoralized for the last week or so, what with my current losing streak still going, along with the card room that's been vital to me now handing out a huge EV pay cut by drastically scaling back their promotions.

I ragequit my last poker session after I dropped $400 in the first hour on an excellent bluff, well-timed, in a good spot, against a good player who would know to fold most of his range in that spot, a reg who could fold, in my assessment. He snapped me off holding only AK high. Nice hand, sir.

Yesterday, I cleaned my bathroom, just to check off having done something useful. Even with a small bathroom like mine, there still are many shelves and ridges and curves and corners and fixtures to be scrubbed. The toilet itself provides a plethora of fractal shapes to clean around.

That thought almost stopped me in my tracks, but I just started cleaning the dirtiest areas first, and then I worked my way around to the next dirtiest, telling myself that I could stop any time I wanted to, but knowing that I would probably keep going once my cleaning reached a critical mass of momentum.

I got it done. Today, I'm going to try to make it back to the casino.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 1 hour
(-$400.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 5 hours
+$74.72

Running Poker Total: 606 hours, +$10387.00

Running Slot Total: 321 hours, +$10656.09

Grand Total: 927 hours, +$21043.09

A Review of Dawn, a Novel by Octavia Butler

Introduction

Note: This intro is so long that I'm posting it separately. I'll be back with the actual review at some point, if the damn aliens don't swipe me first.



Scare quotes, indeed. Where to begin? Dawn is a science fiction novel by Octavia Butler detailing the rather fraught interactions between a group of humans and a race of aliens who rescued them from Earth after a nuclear apocalypse made the planet uninhabitable for 250 years.

I was a young man when the book came out in 1987, and while I didn't read Octavia Butler's work at the time, I was quite fearful about the prospect of aliens. Most of my youthful alien dread came as a result of reading a book called Communion: A True Story by horror and science fiction writer Whitley Strieber. That one book terrified me more than any other I've read in my life.

Communion is also a movie starring Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber, and one in which I have no interest in seeing.

Strieber's book is about multiple alien abductions and experiments on himself and his wife and his young son. He and his wife experienced a phenomenon that Strieber called "lost time", wherein they would fall into a sort of fugue state, occasionally marked with strange visions, and resulting in minutes or hours lost, unaccountable in their memories.

The memories of abduction and experimentation came out during hypnosis, although the young son volunteered—without being hypnotized and having never been told of his parents' experiences—that he had frequent dreams involving "the little grey doctors." The aliens in the book are the classic "greys": thin, short, grey in color, long necks, big heads, small noses, big almond-shaped eyes, and their experiments on people are reportedly exercises in invasive night terrors.

You know the type, from the X-Files or South Park or a thousand other references. Communion: A True Story contributed to many of the alien tropes that we know so well today, although Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie predates Strieber's book by 10 years, and historical reports of similar beings go back thousands of years, as our Ancient Aliens guy up top has purported.

Enough. There are plenty of rational and scientific explanations for this phenomena that don't involve little grey men and butt stuff. I have spent the last 35 years acquainting myself with these skeptical views. However, Strieber is a very good writer; he was a successful horror and science fiction novelist in his own right, and in Communion his abject terror and dismay at what happens to him, his family, and even some of his friends is so palpable that it practically sweats through the page.

Decades after giving myself a good scare with the alien stuff, I'm mostly over it, but that sort of lingering baggage is likely to affect my review of Ms. Butler's Dawn.

There's just one story I'd like to tell, though, to wrap up this overly long intro. It involves my very first memory. I was 2, maybe 2 1/2. My parents went out for a motorcycle ride and left my 10 year-old brother to babysit me. This was considered a perfectly normal practice in the early-70s.

My brother almost immediately fell asleep on the couch. I was just tall enough to reach the front screen door latch from the inside, but after opening the door and stepping down onto our front stoop and watching the screen door close, I found that I could not reach the latch from the outside, as it was too high for me on this side, so rather than crying about it, I decided to go a-wandering.

There was a rhythmic, throbbing noise—somewhat akin to the percussion and bass from a ritual Native American dance—coming from our neighbor's house up the hill and across the street. I toddled up there to check that out, crossing our somewhat busy road near where a school bus had recently struck and killed a deaf child. I did not look left or right when I crossed; my toddler narcissism would never allow for the idea of someone hitting me with their car. Pshaw...cars were for taking me places and for nothing else.

I swung around to our neighbor's back yard, wherein a half-dozen or so spirits of light were dancing in a circle to the beat of the rhythmic percussion that had drawn me to this place. No one else was around. I watched the show for a while from a distance, then I tried to open the neighbor's back door, but it was locked, so I turned back around and walked over to the dancers for a closer look.

The next thing I knew, I was standing back in my own driveway, watching my parents pull in on their motorcycle with dismayed looks on their faces for having seen their toddler son hanging around outside, unattended.

Years later, my parents confirmed that they had gone out for a ride for 30 minutes or so and found me standing outside when they returned. Also, at some point in my childhood, I noticed that I was missing a small chunk of flesh from my right ear, and that the ear seemed to be intact in some of my baby pictures from before my little jaunt to the neighbors.



My parents don't remember any event that might have sliced off that chunk, so you might imagine the sort of impression that a book like Communion: A True Story would make on a lad in his late teens, having had the early experience of visions and lost time, and missing a piece of himself. But, like I said, I'm over the fear, but it still makes for a story, and it likely makes for some bias on my part when reviewing books with aliens in them.

A Review of Dawn, a Novel by Octavia Butler

Conclusion

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of extraterrestrials treating humans like lab animals, even if their intentions are benevolent, and Octavia Butler's keenly realized book Dawn—the first title in her Lilith's Brood trilogy—only affirms my ambivalence towards alien busybodies.

Butler's aliens are written as being smarter than us; how can a writer portray characters who are smarter than her? After all, we don't expect our cats to be able to explain how we drive a car, yet we do demand that our science fiction and speculative fiction writers portray superior beings to our satisfaction.



The writer has to use trickery to pull this off. I've noticed that successful attempts often make the ascendant characters quirky, unpredictable and baffling. And the gifted beings are typically a step ahead of the plot, or they're driving the plot in ways that the readers can't understand at the time, but may become apparent later on.

If the tricks are done well, they generate compelling characters. I'm thinking of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, or Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon's Rick Sanchez. Octavia Butler pulls off the tricks convincingly, in my opinion. Her advanced aliens in Dawn are credibly invested in their peculiar ways, and inscrutable until they can be bothered to explain themselves.

They have been travelling around in massive sentient spaceships for billions of years, flying for so long that they believe their home world no longer exists. Possibly it's been extinguished in the same way that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun in 5 billion years, but we are never told of their planet's actual fate.

There are a whole host of things the aliens don't tell our human protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, a Black American woman, as they wake her up intermittently after long periods of suspended animation over the course of 250 years, after humanity nearly destroyed itself on Earth in a nuclear holocaust perpetrated—in an alternate 1980s—by the Americans and the Soviets.

At first, Lilith wakes up naked in a closed, nearly featureless room with only two stark platforms for a bed and a table. She's fed a tasteless gruel—which appears on the table while she's asleep—and she has no bathroom, and has to piss and crap in the corner of the room. Days, maybe weeks go by and no one speaks to her, and she succumbs to the confinement and isolation. She injures her hands pounding on the walls. After that, she's put back into a long hibernation.

This cycle of awakenings and hibernations repeats several times. Her confinement conditions gradually improve. She's given a toilet and sink at some point, and then she's given clothes, later she finds herself with a young human child for company, although she and the boy speak different languages.

On the next awakening, the child is gone, and an androgynous voice begins to ask her questions about herself, her family and her former life on Earth. She eventually becomes angry at the voice because it won't answer any of her questions, so she decides to stop responding to it. For that rebellion, she's left in isolation and silence until she breaks down again and is put back to sleep.

Here we have the question of whether a species that is intellectually and technologically superior is necessarily one that is morally superior. When we look at Rick Sanchez from the Rick and Morty show, we can see that he's a towering genius, but that he also comes across as an amoral sociopath. So the answer from the viewpoint of good fiction is that there isn't a correlation between advancement and morals, assuming that we can agree that morals exist apart from cultures, and if so which morals? But those last two questions are beyond the scope of this review.

We find out that the aliens have been breaking Lilith because they've seen leadership qualities in her, and they want to rebuild her to become the leader of the first team of humans to be returned to Earth, which the aliens have been re-terraforming for two and a half centuries, to the point where it's once again feasible for habitation.

At least that's what they tell Lilith; it's possible that weren't breaking her so much as they were initially just terrible at taking care of humans. One of the aliens admits that mistakes were made with the whole letting Lilith fester in silence and isolation and her own filth at the beginning of her captivity.

The aliens eventually introduce themselves to Lilith in the flesh. They are hideous grey humanoids with no faces. Hundreds of earthworm-like tentacles serve as their only sensory organs. I don't recall them having any orifices; maybe they absorb and exude things through their skin? Their ship is a living membrane, sections of which they can part or close at will, so perhaps they can do that with their own skin as well.

The males and females of the species have two arms and two legs, but there's also a third gender who, when mature, grow a second set of arms to use as sex organs. The third gender individuals act as a dual connector in an alien ménage à trois model of sex.

The standard human reaction upon first seeing these aliens is extreme fight or flight, so the latter have become leery of introducing their physical forms to the humans without the proper preparations and conditions. Ameliorating this visceral disgust and fear response is another reason why the aliens recruit Lilith as a leader of and ambassador to the Earth return team.

The aliens are masters of genetic manipulation, so they give Lilith a photographic memory, improved language learning skills, greater physical strength, and better and faster healing. But when they awaken the human return team from their long hibernation, the gifts they've given to Lilith only serve to alienate her—pun intended—from the other humans. The people she is supposed to be leading see her as a traitor, a quisling, a Judas Goat. It will take all of Lilith's considerable strategic skills, leadership abilities, and force of will keep the team together and begin the recolonization of Earth.

The aliens aren't a huge help to Lilith in her endeavor, though not from a lack of ham-fisted trying. They see and represent themselves as the benevolent force here, having rescued humanity from mass suicide, having hosted the humans on their ship while spending decades repairing the damage done to Earth, and having prepared the humans as well as they could to return to their homeland.

But...

There's always a but. This species has been flying through space for eons, contacting and assisting other species, because they're interested in making a trade with everyone they encounter. It's the same trade every time. And it's...well, there's a good reason why this trilogy is titled Lilith's Brood: the hideous aliens are down to clown.

Eww.

They want a hybrid species to be the one who recolonizes Earth. Needless to say, this does not go over well with the human return team, and Dawn ends in violence.

Butler's Dawn is an excellent book. The alien and human characters are very well drawn, but it's not my thing. I would like to read more by Octavia Butler, but the next one is likely to be outside of the Lilith's Brood trilogy.

They're Juggaloes?

The Book of Revelations is shorter and more interesting and has a better ending. Stop wasting your time with this other drivel.

My pathological liar friend Maynard from the Nit-tastic tales was a Juggalo. He lived with his parents and worked low-end retail jobs (I worked retail as well, so I'm not going to lord it over him) and he claimed to be high up in the Golden Dawn secret society.

His girlfriend worked at my bookstore before I was promoted to manager. She was a nice girl, and kind of a naïve wallflower, and Maynard was her first boyfriend, and he made her steal money from the till.

I was the shift manager, so I had to get her fired, because I couldn't fire Maynard, as he didn't work there. Later on, he started a rumor that I was homeless and living in the bookstore.

It was unfortunate that I used to judge other Juggalos by Maynard. Years later I read a few think pieces about the subgroup and their Family Gatherings, and it seems like they get a bad rap.

Rolling Stone's 480th Greatest Album of All Time: The Weight of These Wings by Miranda Lambert (2016)

I've been ignorant of a wide swath of the musical developments over the last 20 years or so. The fact that I'd never heard of Miranda Lambert really brings to light the gaps in my knowledge.

Many of you likely know that Lambert is a huge star with a 20-year career behind her, filled with dozens of Country Music Awards. numerous Grammys and 7 albums that made it onto the Billboard Top 10—not the country list, the overall list—not to mention that she's had a huge, loyal fanbase all along. She even has a new cookbook.



The Weight of These Wings is Lambert's 6th studio album, and it made it to #1 in the Billboard Country list, and #3 on the Billboard overall list. It's a double album with 24 songs, and most of them are very good.

Lambert's songwriting is solid all the way through, and the song styles vary pleasingly. Her voice is reminiscent of Dolly Parton's, but not close enough to be distracting. The guitar and instrumentals are spot on, and the production is first rate. It's everything you'd expect from a lauded professional at the top of her game.

Being an old Pink Floyd fan, I tend to love slick production values and plenty of instruments doing lots of business, but on The Weight of These Wings, I liked the simple, stripped-down offerings better than the slick ones.

Tin Man comes to mind here. The admiration the protagonist has for someone without a heart, and the yearning to give hers away because she hurts so much, brings me back to times when my own heart has been broken and I've wished for a similar numb quietude.



After heartbreak comes a new relationship, and Pushin' Time is a love song in which the protagonist urges herself and her lover not to dilly-dally when making an essential connection, given how short our lives can be.



I also like the sound of Lambert flipping through the sheet music at the beginning.

The Weight of These Wings has plenty of light, upbeat songs as well. I enjoyed Pink Sunglasses for its catchy hooks and its unpretentious celebration of the joys of discount retail therapy.



Overall, it's an excellent album. It's not going to turn me into a country music fan, but I enjoyed it, and I can understand how the album and the artist are so well-loved.

Rolling Stone Says:

The Nashville superstar sounded especially free and artistically uninhibited after her divorce from Blake Shelton, and she channeled it all into this expansive, mind-clearing two-CD set, an ambitious grab bag of deep breakup tunes (“Use My Heart,” “Tin Man”), Radiohead-y alt-rock moodiness (“Vice”), eye-rolling, scuz-guitar glam (“Pink Sunglasses”), and tender reflections on the bonds and weights of messy commitment (“Getaway Car”).

Short and sweet. They nailed it.

I'd heard of Miranda Lambert, but never listened to this album. "Pushin' Time" is a nice song indeed, I love me some steel guitar. Just checked out "We Should Be Friends" as well, since it was released as a single, but didn't like it.

I liked We Should Be Friends on the first listen, but not so much the second time around for some reason. I guess the flip side of the song seemed like kind of a gatekeeping manifesto, like "if you don't do x and y, then I don't want to be friends with you."

I'm fairly sure that Ms. Lambert didn't mean it that way, but in this modern polarized world, some of her fans probably do.

Tomorrow, I'm returning to the casino. Pinky swear.

Today, I might put out another album review, and I might not. Working on it now.

3 poker updates in a month

Rolling Stone's 479th Greatest Album of All Time: Amor Prohibido by Selena (1994)

Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was a young American artist known as the Queen of Tejano Music, a hybrid genre combining music from around Texas and northern Mexico. Selena was also a budding fashion icon and television star, before she was tragically shot to death at the age of 23 by the obsessed and larcenous manager of her fan and merchandising club. A young Jennifer Lopez began her rise to fame by portraying Selena in a posthumous biopic.

Selana's fourth album, Amor Prohibido, was big hit in the Latino community, reaching #1 on the Billboard Top Latin Albums chart and #183 on the overall Billboard Top 200, making it the first Tejano album to show up on the latter list. Selena toured very successfully for the album, and Amor Prohibido continued to sell strongly until her death. Her next and final album, Dreaming of You, released posthumously, would debut at #1 on the Billboard Top 200.

Although Amor Prohibido came out in '94, the first few tracks on it give me a retro feel, hearkening back to sounds of the 70s and 80s. The third track, Cobarde, carries beats and synth tracks that give off the atmosphere of an early-80's ice skating rink.

I don't mean to be facetious, but I picture a music video of Cobarde having dozens of decked-out ice dancers, and Selena driving around on a Zamboni.



In any case, it's far from my favorite song on the album, and I post it here only as an illustration for my Zamboni conjecture.

Next we have Bidi Bidi Bom Bom: a fun, bouncy Reggae-flavored song with a nice jam towards the end.



Near the end of the short album is Tus Desprecios, with its central European Polka sound. This Polka fusion is standard for some Tejano songs, the origins going back to the 1830's and a large migration of Germans into northern Mexico, who found their Old World music being embraced by their new countrymen.



I heard a lot of Tejano music playing from cars and patios while walking around my old neighborhood in Las Vegas in the late 90's, and I remember wondering about the Polka influence, but not having an instant pocket wiki answer available for all of my questions.

Tejano was an extremely hot genre for a few years, and Selena was credited with bringing about its mass popularity. It's not my thing, but I enjoyed a few tracks of Amor Prohibido nonetheless.

Rolling Stone Says:

Tejana star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez may not have been long for this world (she died when she was just 23), but she remains one of America’s most beloved singer-songwriters. At the heart of her regional Mexican masterwork, Amor Prohibido, is a universal, glittering pop core.

Because I only need the slightest excuse to...

Love the Flaco, Phat Mack. Thank you!

Everyone will polka in Heaven. It will be a blast!

I'll be there for that.

Unfortunately, I'm not there for work. I've been sick the last few days with a thick cough and a runny nose; not things that I want to take to the poker table, If only out of kindness for my fellow players.

I have one expired Covid test left. If I'm still sick tomorrow, I'll try it. My buddy Will is in the medical industry and he says that the kits are good well past their expiration dates.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the next album on the Rolling Stone's Top 500 list and working on my little reblurb for it. I've been putting out a decent quantity of writing lately.

Also, I found a good dark web streaming service with lots of great movies and TV shows on it. And my Ublock and Malwarebytes Browser Guard have so far handled the inevitable malware that comes with the site.

Has anyone seen this Game of Thrones show? It seems pretty good

It's been a nice, relaxing few weeks off, especially with my new Internet pirating hobby.

For movies, I've watched The Arrival (didn't like it), Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (very good) and Barbie (excellent). I'll probably make it a full Barbenheimer soon, although I dislike the way Christopher Nolan paves over his dialog with music and bloooorrraaam sounds.

For TV, I've started Game of Thrones, The Boys, Stranger Things, and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The Wheel of Time series is on my radar in the near future.

However, all that time off has seriously depleted my available funds, so...



I played pretty good poker today, but I whiffed on a monster straight flush/royal flush draw at the end of the session and finished down a little. Fortunately, I ran like a golden god on the slots.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
(-$52.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 5 hours
+$1267.55

Running Poker Total: 610 hours, +$10335.00

Running Slot Total: 326 hours, +$11923.64

Grand Total: 936 hours, +$22258.64

Way to replenish (somewhat) your funds with a slot run good friend

Funny that you mention Barbenheimer because it is exactly the theme of our job Christmas party this coming Thursday. I can't be bothered to find the proper outfit for this peculiar dress code.

Also, if you were an NFL player, you'd surely be a slot receiver.

Welcome back!

Thanks Dubnjoy000! The timing was fortuitous. Still, moar grind is needed.

That's an excellent pun, uberkuber. It's hard to do those right. Good luck with the party! I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything quickly, and I'll wager that you won't be the only unthemed partygoer.

Thanks fid!

Rolling Stone's 478th Greatest Album of All Time: Something Else by the Kinks by The Kinks (1967)

^This album makes my post title format look silly.

The Kinks were an English rock band based around two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies. They were contemporaries with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, playing from 1963 to 1996, and they put out 24 studio albums that generated dozens of top 100 singles. I grew up listening to those singles from The Kinks, either as classic rock from the 60s, or as contemporary radio hits from the 70s and 80s, when I was a kid.

They were a great band. I wasn't a huge fan, but I always liked what I heard on the radio. Their early singles tended to cluster around hard rock and proto-punk: ripping guitar riffs, crashing drums, and short bursts of lyrics, but their albums also had plenty of intricate pop songs with piano and synth and other ornate instruments, and smart lyrics that told stories of life in England and life in general. Come Dancing from their State of Confusion album (1983) is a good example of this.



Something Else by the Kinks features more of the pop and less of the hard rock. My first listen of the album did not start off well. Here's a deleted snippet...

The production quality on Something Else by the Kinks is shitty, and the songs are in mono. I found this distracting. It's no excuse that the album came out "way back" in 1967: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties Request also came out that year, and both of these have excellent sound quality, in stereo. The Kinks were not a garage band when Something Else by the Kinks came out; this was their fifth studio album.

It turns out that the "official version" of the album on YouTube is a crappy mono mix that sounds like it was ripped through a cheap 1980s cassette recorder. After searching a few more pages down through the results, I found a vinyl reissue in much better quality, with most of the songs in stereo. It is a Spanish pressing, and the YouTube uploader calls the band Los Kinks.

Something Else by the Kinks has only one single that I recognize. That's Waterloo Sunset, and it's pretty good.



The other song I like is Harry Rag, which sounds like a bawdy old shanty.



Of course I had to find out what a Harry Rag was. It's cockney rhyming slang for a cigarette, the word for which in England if you recall, rhymes with rag.

Overall, this is not my favorite Kinks album, but I don't dislike it. The Davies brothers' variety of musical styles capped with their meaningful lyrics always make their albums worth a listen.

Rolling Stone says:

Something Else was a commercial flop that nearly killed the band, but it shows off Ray Davies’ genius for writing about the secret lives of everyday people.

The full title is Something Else by the Kinks, but the critics shortened it so they wouldn't run into awkward title spots like mine.