I think it was probably a recommendation on The Critical List radio show that led to me buying this album.
The received critical wisdom seems to be that the Kinks took a left turn with this album — possibly catalysed by their being banned from America — and decided to counter the counter-culture by recording a loose concept album of conservative English values at a time when everyone else was doing mid-Atlantic psychedelia, White Album weirdness and Satanic Majesty's Crowleyism.
The title track more or less conforms to that assessment, but there's something there that sticks in my craw: I just can't enjoy a song that would have John Major nodding in furious agreement (even though I enjoy watching the cricket on the green in the village where my parents live).
Anyway, the Kinks' Englishness is not a pastoral idyll, thank goodness. A penny dropped for me when I saw Ray Davies performing and reading his autobiography in 2001 or 2002: he described his father's involvement in music hall, and his performance owed much to those traditions. The Kinks' Englishness is the bawdy, magpie-like, nudge-and-a-wink, urban knees-up of the music hall.
So instead of sounding like Nick Drake, the backing to Last of the Steam-Powered Trains sounds to me like it borrows from the blues Dylan did on Blonde on Blonde, and Animal Farm has echoes of tracks like the Stones' Play With Fire — though in both cases there is less attitude and less bite in the Kinks' music. (Not since their early days had the Kinks made music that would make a girl want to drop her knickers.)
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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