The Fall And Rise of The British Left

Crayola Lectern has absorbed influences from Noughties nutters, The Polyphonic Spree, Sixties luminaries, Syd Barret, the Beach Boys and even the Beatles. An hour of gorgeous melody, big piano ballads, semi-symphonic wig-outs and lugubrious vocals are shot through with a very British sensibility. The first vocal we hear is My goldfish died of boredom, to the sound of something like The Beatle's Day In The Life piano and it will win you over right there. Winsome tunes appear and disappear, feeling very like part of a larger whole, rather than separate tracks on an album. Slow down, you're running around like you've got a rocket up your arse intones our singer and the album absorbs us a little more. Brass instruments appear and lonesome cornets create atmosphere while larger forces ebb and flow. Some parts, like Trip In D are slow, drifting and truly psychedelic, propelling the mind into reflective places and impulses of guitar or drum push a little further atop the uneven soundbed.

At its peak in the early 20th century, Britain's empire was the largest in the history of the world, greater even than that of ancient Rome. It embraced more than a fourth of the world's population and affected the course of Western civilization in ways almost too numerous to imagine.

The Kinks were one of the most influential bands of the British Invasion. Early singles "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" were brutal, three-chord ravers that paved the way for punk and metal while inspiring peers like the Who. In the mid-'60s, frontman Ray Davies came into his own as a songwriter, developing a wry wit and an eye for social commentary that culminated in a pair of conceptual LPs, The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), that proved enormously influential over the years.