The Kinks - Phobia - Alternate Version (1993)

The latest news is that the Kinks could be reuniting, with Ray Davies and Dave Davies working on a new album together. Personally, I'm very skeptical that anything will come of it. But in hopes that it'll come true, let's celebrate by taking a look at the last Kinks album of all new material, "Phobia."

The Kinks had a pretty consistent run of album up through "Word of Mouth" in 1984. But their albums in the late 1980s and "Phobia" in 1993 were all highly problematic. With "Phobia" there was literally too much of a good thing. The album was 76 minutes long, which was about as long as an album could fit on a single CD. A common trend in the first ten years of so of the CD was what I call "CD-bloat-itis." Meaning, before the CD, artists had to edit themselves down to fit their music on about a 45 minute long album, but with the CD becoming the dominant music form, they didn't have to do that anymore. Songs got longer, and songs that didn't deserve to be on the album got thrown on.

"Phobia" is one of the worst examples of this. The first thing I did was remove all the sub-par songs. Then I took an axe to some songs that were good, but went on a couple of minutes too long: "Drift Away," "Only a Dream," "Surviving," and "Hatred (A Duet)." For the first three, I found good points to edit down the ends of the studio versions. But for "Hatred," I found a version the Kinks did for a live TV show that was only four minutes long instead of six. (The fact that they played a shorter version in concert shows how unnecessarily long the album version was.)

Then, even though the album was too long to begin with, I added some songs that didn't make the album but were better than some of the ones that actually did: "Did Ya," "Look through Any Doorway," "Eternity," and an acoustic version of "To the Bone." The first two were actually released on an obscure EP two years earlier, but one of them was included as a "Phobia" bonus track, so I figure they were fair game. "Eternity" was a Dave Davies demo that went unreleased at the time and came out much later. Probably it, like Dave's "Look through Any Doorway," didn't get included because Ray Davies wouldn't allow very many of his brother's songs on the album. I included an unreleased acoustic version of "To the Bone" so it wouldn't duplicate the version on the 1996 "unplugged" style "To the Bone" album, which is technically the Kink's last album. It's a demo from the "Phobia" era, but probably was written a little too late to make the album.

One problem with "Phobia" was that the Kinks decided to go for a hard rocking sound on many of the songs, sometimes verging on heavy metal. Perhaps it was an attempt to sound relevant with the popularity of Nirvana and "grunge" in the early 1990s, but this sound has not dated well for them, and didn't really fit the songs. The songs I removed got rid of most of the worst offenders, giving the album more of a typical Kinks sound.

Despite the four added songs, I still managed to remove or edit down so many songs that the album is 53 minutes long instead of 76. I think the album would have been much more acclaimed if the Kinks would have used similar restraint.

If you've never given the album a serious listen, you should now. Ray and Dave Davies never lost their songwriting chops, it's just that they became more hit and miss, and made mistakes like chasing production trends that didn't suit their music. With the "misses" removed, I think this is a very solid album.

01 Did Ya (Kinks)
02 Look through Any Doorway [Open Up Your Heart] (Kinks)
03 Drift Away [Edit] (Kinks)
04 Still Searching (Kinks)
05 Eternity (Kinks)
06 Only a Dream [Edit] (Kinks)
07 Surviving [Edit] (Kinks)
08 The Informer (Kinks)
09 Hatred [A Duet] (Kinks)
10 Somebody Stole My Car (Kinks)
11 Close to the Wire (Kinks)
12 Scattered (Kinks)
13 To the Bone [Acoustic Version] (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376808/TKNKS1993PhbiaAlternte_atse.zip.html

The cover is unchanged from the official release.