Music Review

Is It Love Or Desire

Album | Betty Davis
By Jim Allen

Blistering, hard-as-nails funk laced with biting rock guitars and driven by a hyperactive libido

Betty Davis did more for her onetime husband Miles' career than he ever did for hers: Betty, a former model and full-blooded ‘60s scenester, introduced Miles to her forward-looking pals like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, enormously influencing Miles' subsequent psych/funk/jazz milestone Bitches Brew, the rest of Miles' post-‘60s career, and, um, music itself. On her own, Betty was a forthright, larger-than-life figure who brooked no b.s. and defied her era's gender stereotypes. Between 1973 and '75, she made three amazing albums of blistering, hard-as-nails funk laced with biting rock guitars and driven by a hyperactive libido and an urge to shout about it. Davis became a cult favorite, but fame eluded her, and she walked away from music. 33 years after the fact, the long-moldering sessions for what would have been Davis' fourth album have finally been released. Easily the equal of her earlier albums, it finds Davis spitting fire, strutting like a she-devil, and with her heavy-hitting band, laying waste to everything in her path. On the brink of career dissolution, she's angrier than ever, wailing, shouting, and roaring like a lion with an arrow in its heart but plenty of thunder left in its lungs.

TAGS: 1976, Career Trouble, Famous Spouses, Farewell Albums, Funk-Rock, Heavy Soul, Lost Album, Nasty Girl, Sex,

FACTS: Released: September 29, 2009 (Light In The Attic Records)