Artist:     Ray Davies

Album:     Our Country: Americana, Act II

Label:     Legacy Recordings/Sony Music Entertainment

Release Date:     6..29.2018

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Ray Davies’s Americana project was well under way before the age of Trump. It began with a book of that title in 2013, followed by an album with the same name in 2017. His latest release, Our Country: Americana, Act II, continues the theme at a time when it’s more important than ever to consider what America, the idea, means.

Although quintessentially British (think “Village Green Preservation Society”), Davies has had a long love affair with American music and culture. The Kinks were banned from the United States from 1967 through 1971, but when they returned, they toured extensively for the next two decades. Live and in the studio, The Kinks enjoyed one of rock’s most successful second acts, powered by Davies’s exceptional songwriting. Our Country sounds at times familiar but veers into spoken word and prosaic storytelling rather than relying on traditional song lyrics and catchy riffs.

The result is an album of impressions and experiences. America, for Davies, began as “a flickering black and white image through an old movie projector” before the music took hold of him: “rock, jazz, skiffle and blues—those country songs came to liberate me” (from “The Invaders”). Davies lived in New Orleans in the early Aughts, and the Big Easy features prominently on Our Country, from “Louisiana Sky” to “The Big Weird,” the latter reflecting on his being shot in the leg during a robbery in the French Quarter in 2004. There’s an encounter with a Scandinavian groupie in St. Paul, Minnesota (“The Take”), and Native American rhythms in Phoenix and Albuquerque that lead him back to his homeland (“Calling Home”).

Adding to the album’s authenticity in terms of American roots music are The Jayhawks, ace alt-country musicians including guitarist Gary Louris and vocalist Karen Grotberg. There are songs like “The Getaway” where Davies still rocks, but this is a more reflective and deeply personal album, an important late-career project by an important artist. Leave it to a Brit to show us America, “the land of ice cream and apple pie, guns and the wild west.” Then again, we’ve come to expect nothing less from such a well-respected man.

—Lou Montesano