Weather - Hury Lewis & The News: Review
are a California new wave band that played an absolutely essential role in the popularizing of new wave in the 1980's with hits like The Power Of Love and Hip To Be Square. They have released records here and there ever sense but have been on a break from new material for about a decade leading up to Weather.
Review By Lavender:
I will be the first person to admit that I have a soft spot for Sports and Fore! a pair of often overlooked new wave records that had more attention to detail and decade defining swagger than they ever get credit for. That being said the rest of their output can be pretty hit or miss and that is exactly the best way to describe Weather.
When the record is good its because its groovy, funny, tongue-in-cheek and most importantly catchy. The opener While We're Young is a kooky love song about doing it right here right now before we get any older. Aside from a bridge that is so silly its painful the track is pretty charming and well performed to get the record off to a good start. Her Love In Killin Me is another incredibly groovy track with a genuinely very catchy hook. The campy guitars and smooth horns make this song the most inherently 80's of the bunch but its a misunderstood nostalgia that still manages to connect with me. The last song I really liked was Remind Me Why I Love You Again which is actually genuinely hilarious given the lovey attitude of the rest of the record. The line about having a sleep number bed absolutely kills me and I think this is just a groovy good song that reminds us all to ask why we are with the person we're with.
Unfortunately when this record isn't good it is really something. Hurry Back Baby actually has a pretty cool instrumental but the lyrics and more importantly the performance are so hammed up it almost feels like parody at times. I Am There For You is just way too adult contemporary for me and the background singing is such a mess it ruins half of the song. The track sounds like a soundtrack to the weakest most boring vanilla sex I can imagine and it makes me sad to listen to it.
The end of the record has even more surprises. Pretty Girls Everywhere is quite boomer in both attitude and sound. There are barely any lyrics aside from the songs title and the attitude makes my head spin, I'm just not sure who this song is for and who is actually going to listen to it. Finally the closing track One Of The Boys is a reflective country ballad that sees Huey reflecting on the first band he saw as a child and wanting to play that kind of music and it is just really something to behold. I recommend listening to it for the same reason you would go to a zoo, in some ways its fascinating, you won't want to see it more than once.
Weather isn't a comeback record for Huey Lewis that is going to make any new fans, but it at least has moments that throw it back to the bands heyday. At under 30 minutes the record is majorly inconsistent and when it misses it tends to miss incredibly hard, but honestly for a new Huey Lewis & The News album in 2020 I wouldn't have expected anything else. 4/10
