I cannot, for the life and death of a clown, think of a better way to insinuate myself into a new day than by listening to the Kinks' Arthur Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. But "listening" is an incredibly understated way of describing and encoding the action--dare I might say, without effective brevity: feeling it, letting it inform every mechanical and biological function possibly contained within my body. As many amongst us have figured out over the years, music has an uncanny ability to sublimate, morph, and generally add a sense of pleasure to banal, quotidian, and commonplace activities, such as cleaning the kitchen. For me, Arthur accomplishes a feat even greater than the simple addition of pleasurable background noise.

As I cross the threshold separating my room from the kitchen, the warm, euphoric chords of "Victoria" promise a better-than-banal dishwashing experience. Not a minute in to the track, the simple chorus--repetition of the cry "Vic-tor-ia!"--convinces my vocal chords to collaborate with mouth and tongue and teeth, eventually causing, after a few scratchy false starts, my voice to careen along with Ray Davies with a cowboy's abandon. If I am not bounding across the kitchen floor, inaccurately picking out the guitar part during the song's half-breakdown around the 2:40 mark, punctuating those lines with my best attempts to replicate the guitar-incision-as-period as well, then I might be in the market for coffee's services.

The next three tracks on the album, while fantastic, imbue less wild energy than faithful crooning along to Ray Davies' inciscively witty analyses of bourgeois British society, war-mongering and empire-building. This is when the bulk of my kitchen work, ostensibly my primary goal, is actually completed. Then...

What's this?! As soon as the drums roll in on "Brainwashed," suds are flying. I'M FLYING. I'm bouncing! The understated guitar work is excellent, but it is only to provide groveling service to the towering, strutting, king-like horns. By this time, I've startled the dog and have to be careful that my less-than-well-orchestrated air guitar windmills and scissor-kicks have not decapitated or irrevocably dismembered poor Eliot. Shoo!

For no other reason than creative laziness, I'll basically elide over the rest of Arthur's tracklist-proper; Expect to mention (parenthetically, of course, that "Shangri-La" is one of the greatest songs ever, as is the subsequent "Mr. Churchill Says": Mid-song "the-town-is-being-bombed-holy-shit-shit-fuck!" sirens, anyone?)

By the time bonus track "This Man He Weeps Tonight" hits its stride, I am wailing along with Dave Davies' searching, impassioned chorus ("But this man he weeps tonight/And his head is bow with sorrow/But what can you do sitting there?!/When you'll let him cry tomorrow/Yes you'll let him cry tomorrow"), as the tambourine prods insistently and I clutch a dampened dish towel, my ever-pruning hands cycling through various textures and being dried-out unlike the Man's tears.