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(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Though it has been decades since I've had a favorite band, in the days that I did, no band touched me more deeply than the Kinks. If memory serves, the band of the brothers Davies reigned longest atop my pantheon of favorites (succeeding the Rolling Stones, anticipating Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music). During the Kinks' creative heyday of the late 1960s and early '70s, the music touched chords -- wistfulness, longing, a creative tension of wry intelligence, brittle emotion and reckless abandon -- that was beyond the realm of almost any other rock.

Favorite bands inevitably either break up or outlast their reason for being, turning themselves into product machines and touring self-caricatures. Yet the Kinks' belated demise (did they ever really announce a breakup?) has had a liberating effect on its frontman, whose solo career has found him flying under the radar, but whose music recaptures a sense of time and place evoked by superior Kinks efforts such as 1969's Village Green Preservation Society and 1971's Muswell Hillbillies.

On Working Man's Cafe, the time is now, and the place is what it must be in this day of globalization, outsourcing, cyberspace and American cultural imperialism -- an everywhere that feels like nowhere. Or at least it does to Davies, an artist on the cusp of turning 64, yet one whose aesthetic sensibility has changed little since he was in his mid-20s. Fact is, after the pre-punk bashing of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day And All Of The Night" (classics that owed as much or more to brother Dave's guitar), the young Davies often sounded like a much older man, living on memories, lamenting loss, evoking a better world than this but somehow sustaining a loopy-grinned optimism.

Thematically, much of this album can be heard as a post-millennial sequel to the Muswell Hillbilies song "20th Century Man", though it thankfully lacks the sort of heavy-handed conceptualism that marred lesser, later work. The opening "Vietnam Cowboys" shows the darker side of globalization, in which mass production in Saigon and layoffs in Cleveland are flip sides of the same coin. "Economic meltdown, nobody said it would last forever," sings the chipper Davies (while warning an unnamed president to "zip up your pants and get it together").

The lovely title track decries a neighborhood lost to American chains and internet cafes, with the singer "looking for some place to fit in." "Peace In Our Time" encompasses both foreign wars and domestic squabbles, in a world that is "just like a roller coaster, if you let it it'll crush you down." The sharpness of Davies' social commentary finds its musical match in riveting hooks and lilting melodies that have long characterized his best work.

If there is no "Waterloo Sunset" here, no "This Is Where I Belong", no "Days", perhaps only a younger artist can ache with such beauty. And perhaps it's unfair to expect any artist to do what he's done before, though the sunrise urban vignette of "In A Moment" provides a bookend of sorts for "Waterloo Sunset", reminding that such a moment of paradise, like everything else, is transitory. Blink, and you've lost it.

Particularly encouraging is "The Voodoo Walk", which, after all these decades, sounds like nothing that Davies has previously recorded, and seems more like a sinuous cross between Chet Baker and Dr. John. Yet it's recognizably the work of the same artist responsible for not only the rest of the album, but for one of the most underrated bodies of work in all of rock.

Though Davies is arguably the best songwriter the British Invasion produced, even at their popular peak the Kinks seemed more like a cult band, an acquired taste, never amassing the cultural currency of the Beatles or the Stones or the Who. Even so, none of Davies' Anglo contemporaries are still producing work that is not only as inspired as this, but renews the essence of what made the artist great in the first place. God save the village green.

-- DON MCLEESE
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Don McLeese.