Face to Face by The Kinks

Face to Face, the Kinks' fourth long-player, arrived on Pye on 28 October 1966 with Shel Talmy producing, and it finds the band trading in the hard-charging beat music that first made their name for something stranger and far more English. Baroque pop and music hall tunes crowd the grooves, it's their first LP made up entirely of their own songs, and critics have called it one of rock's very first concept albums.

The real story is Ray Davies, whose songs have turned into sharp, sly little sketches of English life, social class and the music business itself, with brother Dave on lead guitar and Mick Avory on drums, in a year when bassist Pete Quaife briefly left and John Dalton stepped in. "Sunny Afternoon" was the hit, yet the album got a lukewarm reception, No. 12 at home and No. 135 in America. Time has been kinder: it has since come to be seen as a turning point of the psychedelic years, and Robert Christgau put it in his Basic Record Library.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.