Aalon showed a tremendous amount of promise on its debut album,
Cream City, which was among the finest albums of the late 1970s and indicated that lead singer and songwriter Aalon Butler had the potential to develop into someone as important as Sly Stone or
George Clinton. His music was soul and funk with rock elements, and the writing is superb on material ranging from the playful title song and the sentimental "Summer Love" to the poignant "Rock and Roll Gangster" and the haunting "Lonely Princess." In fact,
Cream City is every bit as strong as the five-star albums that
Prince and
Rick James would be providing a few years later. But while
Cream City's title song enjoyed some airplay on Black stations, the LP was far from the major hit it should have been. One hoped that a second album would make
Aalon huge, but regrettably, a second album never came about. ~ Alex Henderson