Gavin B.

LOW BUDGET KINKS

I stumbled across a mega value for anyone who's a fan of the Kinks. On Christmas Day, 2009, the Kinks own Velvel Records began selling both two different Kinks completist collections, The Arista Years and The RCA Years as MP3 downloads for the astounding price of $11.99 each. Each anthology was issued in 2006 is a six volume set. The Arista Years in compact disc format sells for $63.98 and The RCA Years sells for $51.99 at Amazon.

All of the songs on both Arista and RCA have been remastered and the remastering is a big improvement on the orignial recordings.

The RCA Years contains the full content (99 songs) of 6 albums recorded by the Kinks for RCA between 1971 and 1975. ALBUMS: Muswell Hillbillies, Everybody's in Show-Biz, Preservation: Act 1, Preservation: Act 2, A Soap Opera, Schoolboys in Disgrace.

The Arista Years has the full content (101 songs) of 7 albums recorded by the Kinks for Arista between 1977-1984. ALBUMS: Sleepwalker, Misfits, Low Budget, One for the Road, Give the People What They Want, State of Confusion, and Word of Mouth.

Two cautions to buyers: 1. I have no idea of how long those cheap prices apply to the two albums. 2. For casual Kinks fans: There are no songs from the Kink's Pye/Reprise years from from 1964 until 1970 when they recorded the bulk of the popular songs in their catalog like Sunny Afternoon, Lola, Victoria, You Really Got Me, Stop Your Sobbing and Picture Book. These two sprawling collections of the lesser known Kinks music may not the best starting points to get aquainted with the Kinks. For newer Kinks fans I'd suggest Kink's Kronicles many of the oft requested classic Kinks songs.

For my own musical needs the downloads were perfect. I have very little of the Kinks' music issued after 1970. I have the compact disc issues all of their albums from their Pye/Reprise years, except for the long out of issue rarity The Great Kinks Lost Album released by Pye in 1973, three years after the Kinks left the label. I don't know if there's ever been a compact disd re-issue in the lost album in the USA.

In all honesty there's a great deal of material on The RCA Years and The Arista Years that is sub-par to their brilliant body of earlier work with Pye but there's around 30 songs that are absolute jewels and another 30 songs that will get a fair amount rotation on my Zune player and my Windows Media player song lists.