There are some Kinks songs that I never think of as Kinks songs, and Sunny Afternoon is one of them. The Kinks were such a protean band, changing their style and approach drastically from their early output to their later records (in some ways, this is what Steely Dan did as well--they also started as kind of a straight-ahead rock band and delved further into their own idiosyncrasies in their later discography), but even that doesn't fully account for the disconnect I have when I listen to this song and think about it coming from the Kinks. There's a funny kind of melancholy here, filtered through the narrator's character, but also hammered home by that descending bass (etc.) riff--and while the Kinks did melancholy well, I don't think they ever made it so bleak, musically, as they made it on Sunny Afternoon. It's another reminder of how good this band was and how easy it was for them in their heyday to churn out finely wrought pocket masterpieces.[BUY Sunny Afternoon: the Very Best Of]