Album Reviews

If you were going to pick one album from the Kinks Katalog for an SACD remastering it wouldn’t be Low Budget and that’s all there is to it. Not that it’s a bad Kinks album. It’s just not one of their best, though it was certainly one of the group’s most popular. Leave it to the public to ignore Arthur, The Village Green Preservation Society and Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Goround not to mention Face to Face and Something Else while driving Low Budget to gold sales status.

Issued in 1979 and mostly recorded at New York’s The Power Station at a time when the band was based in New York, Low Budget reflects American concerns during the Jimmy Carter “malaise” period: there was a gas shortage and American self-esteem was at low ebb. Ray addresses the latter in his sympathetic “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” (using one guitar riff lifted from “Jumping Jack Flash” and another that sounds as if Ray was listening to Van Halen) and the former in “A Gallon of Gas,” while the opener, “Attitude,” addresses a “trendsetter” who misses the scene by 20 years.

Recording, living, rehearsing and touring in America obviously agreed with Ray, who is quoted in the liner notes (from an Arista promo interview LP) as saying “The time I spent writing and recording this has been the happiest time ever. For me.” How could it not be? Only a few years before at the peak of the band’s initial popularity in America, Ray and the boys were banned from touring by the musicians union. Perhaps the U.S. friendly “Catch me Now…” was intended as an insurance policy of sorts.

Ray’s career-long love of nostalgia mostly gives way on Low Budget to keeping up with modern musical trends, which at the time were leaning heavily toward punk and new wave. Heartening to Ray must have been the many Kinks Kovers these new, young upstarts performed in-concert.

In retrospect it’s easy to hear Ray drawing from The Ramones's trick bag on “Pressure,” but the song demonstrates his desire to reach modern ears with a commercially viable tune, and one that would supercharge a live audience of kids not interested in Ray’s ‘70s campy vaudeville routine. It, and the rest of the album, also demonstrate brother Dave’s superb guitar playing—still on display when Dave tours now. All of Davies’ calculations paid off both on the charts and in concert, as The Kinks became a lean, mean and successful touring machine in support of Low Budget.

Listening 24 years after the fact, Low Budget is a much better album than many original Kinks fans gave it credit for being when it was first issued. In fact, I was originally contracted to write the liner notes for this Mo-Fi release, but a time crunch prevented me from doing so. I did some preliminary research, tapping into a Kinks fanatic’s newsgroup and other resources. This is not a favorite album with most of them as well, but I was surprised by how durable these tunes are, and in the end, aided by an absolutely stunning SACD transfer, I found a new enthusiasm for this much-maligned set.

Three bonus tracks— extended versions of “A Gallon of Gas,” and “Catch Me Now, I’m Falling,” as well as a discofied “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman,” add value to the package.

With most basic tracks cut at The Power Station, and final mixing and massaging done at The Kinks’ own Konk studios, the recorded sound is Klean and Kommercial, with well-chiseled 3D images, well defined, tight and deep bass, about the most convincing sounding cymbals I’ve ever heard from a digital playback source, and superbly transparent Ray vocals. Mo-fi’s SACD mastering chain is absolutely state-of-the-art and mastering engineer Britton’s EQ and other tech choices—whatever they were— are masterful. This edition beats every vinyl edition I’ve heard—including some of the early Mo-Fi test pressings I received for research purposes while prepping for writing the liner notes. If Mo-Fi finally does issue this on vinyl, the story could be different, but for now, if just to hear how transparent and “analogue-like” SACD can sound, this disc is worth picking up (at least, if you’re a Kinks fan!).