Album review: DOOGIE WHITE – As Yet Untitled (2 CD remaster)

Pete Feenstra chatted to Doogie White for Get Ready to ROCK! Radio. First broadcast 8 August 2021.

The Store For Music [Release date 07.06.21]

In 2011, ubiquitous gun-for-hire Doogie (Rainbow/Malmsteen/Schenker) White released a cracking little solo album called As Yet Untitled, a collection of dramatic hard rock songs, written with a number of key musicians he’d worked with over the years.

It has now been reissued, with 2 bonus tracks and a bonus CD.

The album still sounds fresh, and yet classic. Nothing really ignites but almost everything smoulders satisfyingly. White’s wailing musical tones breathe fiery life into the glowing embers of the quasi religious ‘Secret Jesus’ and the phantasmagoric ‘Dreams Lie Down And Die’, causing sparks to fly and flames to flicker.

His voice straddles several decades of rock and metal transition. He’s been around so long now that anything bearing his vocal imprint cannot immediately be dated. Which is useful when you reissue a ten year old rock album.

The second CD, an album of tracks originally recorded by some of the genre greats… Iron Maiden, UFO, Thin Lizzy, shows us just how much White’s voice has matured and evolved over the years, often adding a veneer of operatic grandeur to otherwise straight up rock tracks, like ‘Judgement Day’, ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘This Flight Tonight’, carrying them triumphantly from the past to the present, coating the original’s classic raw sound with a sheen of vocal sophistication.

If anything, each performance underlines just why White is always in demand, and explains just why he hasn’t been out of work since his days selling hot dogs at Rock Venues in the eighties.

This reissue adds 2 bonus tracks, ‘Dishing The Dirt’, written with Mick Tucker, his old Tank colleague, and ‘Small Town Saturday Night’, written with his former Midnight Blue bandmate, Alex Dickson. It was judged “too beautiful and fragile” to include on the original album’s hard rock agenda. It is clearly too good to miss the cut this time round. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)