Dave Davies: Unfinished Business: Dave Davies Kronikles 1963­p;1998

It can't be easy being Dave Davies. After abusing an amp to invent the sound that would reshape rock music on 1963's "You Really Got Me," Davies began to lose the equal footing with which he began his partnership with brother Ray. Throughout The Kinks' career, Dave played George Harrison to his more prolific (and more skilled) songwriting brother's Paul and John. A few moments of glory aside, the terrific "Death Of A Clown" chief among them, he found himself backing his brother through both The Kinks' moments of brilliance and one questionable concept album after another. It's little wonder, then, that Ray and Dave Davies—the rock poet laureate of the post-imperial '60s and the guitarist without whom he would be lost, respectively—would find themselves in the sort of tumultuous relationship that makes the Oasis brothers' bickering seem tame. It's also little wonder that the title of this two-disc collection of Dave Davies' work sounds downright combative, but anyone fearing that Unfinished Business will radically shake up their perceptions of The Kinks needn't worry. Both the first and second discs, the first covering Davies' time with The Kinks and the second his solo excursions, paint a picture of an excellent guitarist who also happens to be a respectable songwriter, but little more. It also showcases a musician unable to look beyond the tastes of his time. Davies' guitar work on a 1979 live recording of "All Day And All Of The Night" rocks in a way that would shame even the spikiest punks of the time, but "Rock And Roll Cities," his contribution to the 1986 Kinks album Think Visual, sounds like a leftover from Kiss' Animalize. And the less said of the stuff from such early-'80s solo albums as AFL 1-3603 and Glamour the better. Unfinished Business has historical value, but the hellish legal entanglements that have always plagued The Kinks' catalog interfere even with this. Collectors will surely thrill to find the pre-Kinks "I Believed You" from the Davies brothers' first band The Ravens, but rare songs from Dave Davies' solo career appear only in re-recorded form, with the best of these taken from some lively-sounding 1997 concert dates. Completists caught up in the excitement of both Velvel and the English label Essential's Kinks reissues need this; others do not.