Consumer Guide Album

The Kinks: The Great Lost Kinks Album [Reprise, 1973]
It says something about the limitations of the Kinks' professional renaissance that this belated compilation of B sides and outtakes, most of them recorded pre-renaissance, at around the time of Village Green Preservation Society, stands as the group's best album of the decade. Fragile, unkempt, whimsical, sometimes thrown away, with brother Dave left room for a cinematic fantasy of his own, it sticks close to the harmless eccentrics who comprise the only socially significant subculture about which Ray has ever had anything interesting to say. A−