HEAVY WEATHER

Heavy Weather is an unusually weak and lazy album by an otherwise wonderful band, Weather Report. This weakness is especially disappointing after the sequence of great albums they had made before Heavy Weather (the immediate predecessor, Black Market, being probably the coolest).

It all begins with the first two songs on Side A, amounting to almost 13 minutes of dumbed-down, repetitive pop music. A note to the producers: If you are going to record some generic pop stuff, at least have the decency to make the songs short & sweet ... 3 minutes if perfectly enough, maybe stretching into 4 minutes with a slowly fading refrain.

The saving grace kicks in with the 3rd title, Teen Town, where the most impressive Mr. Pastorius finally gets around to playing his trademark bass solo. Unfortunately, the rest of the band does next to nothing on this track, and Mr. Pastorius's impro hits the limit switch in less than 3 minutes .. what a bummer.

Things improve somewhat after Teen Town, and a new quality of energy is ushered in by the übercool exotic chants in the beginning of the Side B, but, all in all, this already short (37') album is a little short on innovation and virtuoso musicianship that Weather Report used to be famous for.