"the Kinks"

This box set delivers both a little more and a little less than it promises – though the packaging is so cryptic that it's difficult to say precisely what it does promise. Billed as The Pye Album Collection, it contains ten nicely packaged mini-LP sleeves (each with an appropriate inner sleeve to protect the CD – are you listening, Sony Classical, Rhino Handmade, and Hip-O Select?) representing the group's ten original albums for Pye Records.

Recorded in Glasgow, Scotland, while the Kinks were on tour in 1967, Live at Kelvin Hall (aka The Live Kinks) has the distinction of being the only undoctored concert recording of a British Invasion band at the peak of its popularity…

Schoolboys in Disgrace or The Kinks Present Schoolboys in Disgrace is a 1975 album by the Kinks. According to the back cover liner notes, the story which the album presents is as follows: Once upon a time there was a naughty little schoolboy. He and his gang were always playing tricks on the teachers and bullying other children in the school…

Although they weren't as boldly innovative as the Beatles or as popular as the Rolling Stones or the Who, the Kinks were one of the most influential bands of the British Invasion. Like most bands of their era, the Kinks began as an R&B/blues outfit. Within four years, the band had become the most staunchly English of all their contemporaries, drawing heavily from British music hall and traditional pop, as well as incorporating elements of country, folk, and blues.

The Kinks became arena rockers with Sleepwalker, and its follow-up, Misfits, follows in the same vein, but it's a considerable improvement on its predecessor. Ray Davies has learned how to write within the confines of the arena rock formula, and Misfits is one of rock & roll's great mid-life crisis albums, finding Davies considering whether he should even go on performing…