Dave Davies isn’t waving a little progressive-rock flag saying, “Look everybody, I’m in five.” The basic pulse can be heard as five beats to the bar, often felt less as 1-2-3-4-5 than as an uneven grouping such as 3+2. That’s crucial. Five can easily sound angular, Mission: Impossible territory, but in “Strangers” it feels tender and almost conversational. The missing symmetry gives the song a slight forward lean. You keep expecting the floor to arrive where four-beat pop music has trained you to expect it, and it arrives somewhere else. That’s especially unexpected in the context of The Kinks. It’s a fragile, direct song on Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. The emotional simplicity disguises the structural peculiarity. I think that’s where the brilliance lies. If you didn’t count it, you might never think, five! You’d simply experience a spaciousness. The meter makes the song feel a little unsettled without the listener feeling unsettled by the meter. It’s a wonderful songwriting lesson: odd meter doesn’t sound odd. The cleverest compositional decisions are often like that: you notice their effect years before you notice their existence.