Exposé Online banner

Exposé Online

Not just outside the box, but denying the existence of boxes.
Covering music from the fringes since 1993.

Reviews

Alan Davey — Chaos Delight
(Black Widow BWRCD 033-2, 2000, CD)

by Dane Carlson, Published 2000-10-01

Chaos Delight Cover art

Alan “The Elf” Davey offers up his second solo outing. Like Dave Brock, the former Hawkwind bass player prefers to do it all himself; so you’ve got all instruments, engineering, mixing and production done by Alan. Which can be good if the artist has got something. I didn’t think Chaos Delight quite lived up to its potential. The album cover has non-licensed reproductions of Star Trek’s Enterprise (altered a bit) and the Borg cube. Space 1999’s Eagle One. And the UFOs from mother of all classic sci-fi show’s UFO. You also get an 11 page comic called Chaos Realm with some great artwork by Stefano Scagni. With all that and songs titles like "Sci-Fi Delic," "Theme from UFO," and "Eagle Alpha," I was really hoping for a great album. Almost. "Sci-Fi Delic" is a pretty hard rockin’ tune; Alan has always been a fantastic bass player and it’s that bass that drives this album. His guitar playing is good as well, though he does sound a bit like his old band. The drum playing is fairly simple, keep-the-beat type stuff; some drums sound real, some programmed. But it’s his liberal use of synthesizer that really keeps things spacey, lots of swirling effect type noises. Sadly I don’t recall the theme song very well from UFO, but it rocks. I guess fans of Hawkwind should like this, the riffs are all built over a fairly repetitive rhythm, and while it has its moments, it’s a bit simple and too repetitive.

Filed under: New releases, Issue 20, 2000 releases

Related artist(s): Alan Davey / Hawkestrel

 

What's new

These are the most recent changes made to artists, releases, and articles.