Plain and Fancy: 11/15/22

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Dave Davies - Decade (1971-78 uk, straight ahead rock, ranging from hard rock to pop and all stops in between, 2018 digipak remaster)

It must be tough being in a band with your big brother – especially when he writes the tunes and calls the shots. It doesn’t help when the band you’re in is the Kinks – a volatile powder keg of ego, sibling rivalry, and God only knows what else. We all know that Dave Davies can write a decent tune – check out “Death of a Clown” and “Susannah’s Still Alive” for proof of that, but can the younger Davies brother consistently deliver the goods? If Decade is anything to go on, then yeah, he can.

Decade has been lovingly assembled by Dave’s sons Simon and Martin from recordings made at the band’s Konk Studios, throughout the 1970s. The good news is that it hangs together well as an album and sounds cohesive -not a ragbag of demos and half-baked ideas, but a genuine long-playing record. The other good news is that the tunes are strong and don’t sound as if they were written by his brother. Well, a few do, but they are family, after all.

In the 1970s, the Kinks were an eccentric arena band, packing them in across the USA and ramping up the rock elements of their sound. English whimsy combined with a loud guitar or two was a powerful draw to your average gig going American, and Davies was a major part of that. If you need proof, then just listen to One for the Road – recorded in a variety of American cities (with a couple of tracks from Zurich) in late 1979, Dave Davies guitar is front and center and propels the band forward with real urgency. On Decade, we get a hint of that, but it’s quite surprising that it isn’t more, well, heavy, I guess. This is the guy that invented heavy metal, after all.

by Ian Rushbury, 7 November 2018