Dave Davies
Album: Rippin' Up Time
Label: Red River
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.davedavies.com

Let's celebrate the return of the man behind those grinding guitar riffs that defined the early Kinks sound, a hell of a musician and an underrated singer-songwriter to boot. With Rippin' Up Time, Dave follows up his defiant and well-received 2013 album I Will Be Me (itself a rather fine continuation of the comeback kicked off with Bug a few years earlier).

Rippin' Up Time is a vital, hard-hitting new 10-song set that, basically, forms what Dave himself describes as "a man's reflections of the past, his fears, anxieties and optimism about the present and hopeful expectations of the future". Inevitably then, perhaps, there are distinct - and deliberate - echoes of the music of The Kinks, with an abundance of self-referential moments, knowing borrowings and riff-checks, but the whole is much more than the sum of these parts and nowhere smacks of cheap memory-peddling, not even on the tongue-in-cheek King Of Karaoke, which floats and quotes plenty of amiable Good Vibrations from a Sunny Afternoon down at the local.

Front Room reminisces companionably about the early days of The Kinks, in a musical style, and with vocal harmonies from those Days (and a cheeky paraphrase of the You Really Got Me riff that started it all). Nosey Neighbours could've come from one of the early-70s Kinks albums; and the chugging Waterloo Sunset riff ushers in Through My Window, another song that could so easily be ruminative late-60s Kinks but for its vocal (Dave's son Russ). Dave's signature power-chord-heavy, distorted punk-grunge-garage guitar sound pervades much of the album, above which soar those distinctive, strident vocals. There's shades of Zepp perhaps on the bluesy grind of Mindwash and the similarly philosophical Semblance Of Sanity, with some typically edgy guitar work to stimulate the orifices. And even the warped and angular keyboard textures of Between The Towers empower the killer combination of nostalgia, an affectionate longing for times past, and a healthy criticism of looking back. Equally, the rockney-accent and driving beat of In The Old Days symptomize the downside of revisiting the past. The whole album is like revisiting of the past within the context of a vivid dream, all colours intact but some refracted and fragmented as passed through the prism of today's memory process. It's a masterful set alright.

David Kidman