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 \u201cStrangers\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}