WHITE: WHITE

This is an album recorded by YES`s drummer ALAN WHITE while he was working with some musicians from Seattle (Kevin Currie, Steve Boyce and Karl Haug) with the addition of Geoff Downes from ASIA on keyboards. White has lived in Seattle for several years, and after YES`s last tour with Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman in 2004, YES was inactive as a band until 2008. So, White, like Chris Squire (who worked a bit with THE SYN during those years) worked for a time with these musicians from Seattle , and they recorded and released this album, which is not really a solo album from Alan White, but more a collaboration album which was released in 2006 under the band`s name WHITE. Alan White has credits as songwriter in 5 of the 10 songs of this album, but the main songwriters are Haug, Currie and Boyce, with some collaborations from other musicians like their former keyboard player Ted Stockwell.

The musical style of this band is more Hard Rock with some Prog Rock arrangements and sometimes sounding a bit Pop Rock. Currie`s vocals (who by the way has the same name as one of Supertramp`s former drummers from the early seventies) sound more oriented to Pop Rock and Hard Rock than to Prog Rock. The rhythms are not very complicated and are very related to Hard Rock and Pop Rock too. The main instruments in this album are the guitars played by Karl Haug, who is a very good guitarist, and the keyboard arrangements are more in the background, playing a more supportive role.

The listener can`t really expect this album to sound related to YES`s musical style, like in Alan White`s first solo album from 1976, titled "Ramshackled", which also was more a collaborative effort with other musicians than a real solo album by White. But at least in this WHITE`s band self-titled album Alan White collaborated to the songwriting. He plays the drums very well, as always, and his style of playing shows his talent for playing several musical styles very well. The recording and mixing of this album is very good, but the mixing gives more emphasis to the guitars and the drums.

The cover art was done by Roger Dean, and it is maybe the most YES-related thing in this album, more than the musical style of the band by itself.

Better than Ramshackled

Solo albums by drummers do not grow on trees, but Yes' Alan White has two under his belt. Or, strictly speaking, unlike Ramshackled from exactly three decades earlier, the present album is by a band called White led by Alan. Graced by a nice Roger Dean cover picture and featuring also another Yes man in Geoff Downes on keyboards, one could easily be led to think that this album will sound like Yes. But while Alan's drumming is recognizable and the bass guitar is in the style of Chris Squire, overall this does not sound similar to Yes. Downes' keyboards take the back seat throughout to guitars that have a contemporary, "grungy" Alternative Rock kind of sound while the lead vocals remind me of Fish of Marillion. This is an interesting combination of sounds and the end result is a decent Rock album, but not really a progressive Rock album. There are influences from Pop, American Folk, and even Reggae, but very little Prog. The best track is the acoustically driven closer Waterhole.

While this album is much better than the awful Ramshackled, this is not a terribly impressive effort either.