Review: Snowy White And The White Flames – The Finishing Touch
Snowy White And The White Flames – The Finishing Touch
Format: CD – Vinyl LP – Digital / Label: Independent
Release: 2026
Text: Tom Wouters
After ‘Unfinished Business‘ from 2024 this album seems to be the last album that Snowy White will release; it’s aptly called ‘The Finishing Touch.’ So, it’s the swan song of one of the most authentic and modest musicians of his time, a man playing simply out of love for the music, who will be remembered for his lyrical melancholic guitar sound. The album is recorded with the help of his long-time band The White Flames (a.o. the Dutch rhythm section Walter Latupeirissa – bass, Juan van Emmerloot – drums and Max Middleton – keyboards).
The opening track of the album is the atmospheric instrumental Open Water, after which the influence of Peter Green’s guitar playing is heard in Lost In The Blues, about ‘a hot New York night’. In Music All My Life White tells us that, from an early age on, he was only interested in playing music. In Minefield and the monumental The Finishing Touch White’s concerns about the state of the world come to the fore. In Minefield he’s singing that ‘the world is going crazier and crazier’, and in The Finishing Touch he sings about ‘watching cities burn’ in a track where his guitar sounds as melancholic as ever and the rhythm section splendidly goes along. In the closing track of his last album (The Blues Away) White gives an insight into the reasons why he decided to no longer play for a large audience (‘It’s almost time to draw the curtain of my life, just a few more licks to play’…’In the end I pack my blues away’) since 2019 and now also as a recording artist.
The end comes with an album that is as good as his best works and when Snowy White is finally putting down his guitar, the world will be missing a piece of magic.
Tracks:
01. Open Water
02. Lost In The Blues
03. Just The Way It Is Today
04. Three Long Years
05. Music All My Life
06. Whole Bunch of Nothing
07. Minefield
08. Win Some Lose Some
09. The Finishing Touch
10. The Blues Away
Website: http://www.snowywhite.com/