Betty Davis – ‘Is It Love Or Desire’ (Light In The Attic) – Album review

Album review: Betty Davis – ‘Is It Love Or Desire’ (Light In The Attic)

Betty Davis is doomed to remain best-known as the one-time wife of Miles Davis, but she became a musical cult figure through the three funk-rock albums she made in the mid-’70s: groove-heavy, graphically sexual affairs that prefigured the likes of Prince. It was initially assumed that she gave up on making records after that trilogy, but Is It Love Or Desire proves otherwise. It was recorded in 1976, shortly after Davis’s third album, but it took another 33 years for the tracks to finally see the light of day. These sessions find Davis firing on all cylinders, in a mode more or less similar to that of her earlier recordings. Syncopated beats, funk-happy bass lines, scrappy fuzz guitars, and hip-swiveling keyboard riffs provide the hard-grooving backdrop for her larger-than-life vocal personality. Davis attacks the tunes like a savage beast unleashed, but she doesn’t just roar indiscriminately — she directs her fury straight at the target, so her voice comes punching straight from the center of these songs.
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