[The songs on The Great Lost Kinks Album] marvelously cohere to make this a real album and not merely an assortment of unrelated curios. This of course says a lot for the organic consistency of The Kinks' work. File TGLKA between Something Else and Village Green.

Like most Kinks albums since 1966, this one is sad. Oh, some of the songs sound happy enough, but they're wistful thinking, pathetically evanescent fantasies. There's no getting away from pain, ugliness, and isolation, which a few tracks face squarely. "Where Did the Spring Go?" is an extremely upsetting song about an aging man who has gotten nothing from life but varicose veins. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" is chilling…. I still feel in the vocal's grating, paranoiac edge the fear and the menace of a cornered dog….

In his [liner notes John] Mendelsohn rather querulously argues that The Great Lost Kinks Album is the last great Kinks album, that since moving to RCA the group has sadly deteriorated. Muswell Hillbillies is "clumsily heavy-handed and obvious," and on Everybody's in Showbiz Ray is "bitchily egocentric." He is no longer "sensitizing us" with his "beautiful songs." But MH is surely no more heavy-handed and obvious than earlier numbers such as "Powerman" and "Brainwashed" (one of Mendelsohn's favorites), and Mendelsohn seems not to understand MH's relation to Village Green. One a nostalgic reminiscence of an irrecoverable pastoral childhood, the other a depiction of an inescapable, squalid, urban adulthood, the two work together like [William] Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. As for the bitchy egocentricity of Showbiz, the charge pertains, if at all, to only four of the ten new songs on the album, and these songs possess varying degrees of grim irony, mordant accuracy, and sheer humorousness which more than make up for what ruins them for Mendelsohn. Moreover, Showbiz's "Sittin' in My Hotel" is as beautiful and sensitive a song as one could wish for.

If The Kinks have fallen off somewhat, it is in the quality of their music—Ray's tunes and the band—not in the quality of Ray's lyrics and sensibility. Mendelsohn chooses the wrong line of attack. But why should one feel called upon to malign The Kinks today in order to enjoy them as they were? TGLKA is excellent, and the next Kinks album probably will be too.