Review Summary: Attempting a top-board dive into the rich waters of Spanish folk music, Glow smashes the bottom of the pool and bobs around lifelessly for a while. But manages to look pretty whilst doing it.
Peter White’s smooth jazz outputs are by no means stunning, but display a degree of consistency that a few artists within the genre should take note of. So, mixing Peter White’s dependability with Spanish atmospheres and Latin scales sounds quite intriguing. And it is, so long as you don’t listen to the album all the way through.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some real shimmers of sunlight here. “Who’s that Lady?” is by far the best track on the album. A sexy, steamy, sax-led piece with a stalking beat, it features a melody which glides effortlessly between the provocative and the delicate, building to a sax solo straight out of the Richard Elliot (alto saxophonist) book of sophisticated seduction. “Glow” can only be described as achingly quaint, and “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” is reflective and free to wander though its four minutes of elegant phrasing.
It’s strange. So many albums start brilliantly and then tail of towards the end, like a painter who died during the creation of his masterpiece, leaving the world with a disappointment, and wonder at what could have been. Not so with Glow. Here, it feels as though towards the middle of the album, the artist just lost interest, almost gave up entirely, and then seemingly from nowhere managed to pluck three songs out of nothing that nearly met the high watermark of “Who’s That Lady?”
Independently, “Turn It Out”, “Bullseye” and “Bueno Funk” are great songs, with catchy melodies and laid back basslines, again with a Spanish feel to them. Pretty, even. But when listened to consecutively, they sound almost exactly the same, and three tracks of Flamenco-but-in-reality-not-Flamenco is quite simply irritating. And “Pedro Blanco” is quite simply an awful attempt at a bossa nova.
It’s almost as if Glow was made with the shuffle function in mind. “When I’m Alone” is pretty much a re-working of “Just My Imagination”, just as “Baby Steps” is to “Chasing the Dawn”, except in the former there is the addition of strummed chords. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a terrible album; there are some memorable songs and some interesting melodies. Separately, it’s exciting, but together, it’s frankly a bore, becoming background music that wasn’t composed to be background music.
