"Schoolboys in Disgrace" is, without any doubt, the most impressive and enjoyable album that Ray Davies has written and produced since those halcyon days when the Kinks delivered that essential series of records which includes "Face To Face," "Something Else," "Village Green" and "Arthur."

Davies' recent work, particularly the ambitious "Preservation" trilogy, has not been entirely without its memorable moments, but all too often his vision has lacked that spectacular clarity which characterised many of his earlier compositions.

This album is a celebration of those qualities one admired so completely in Davies as a writer. He's not fully recovered his impressive facility for evocative, commercial melodies, but the majority of the songs contained in this collection have a similar, articulate, affectionate sense of nostalgia about them, which anyone at all familiar with that sequence of albums will immediately recognise. Davies has … rehabilitated himself as a writer….

The essential...