WEATHER REPORT — Mr. Gone (review)

WEATHER REPORT — Mr. Gone album cover Album · 1978 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
1/5 ·
Sean Trane
WR’s eighth album (if you count the Live Tokyo) is certainly the first poorer album in the group’s 70’s career and not even the intriguing artwork will change much to it. Not much I want to add that I would see fit for a proper intro to Mr Gone (they must be speaking of their inspiration) except that obviously by now, the group’s better days were long behind them and this was just business-as-usual, run-of-the-mill , yet-another album, boring routine stuff!

The album-opening is the Pursuit Of The Woman track, which personally really irks me, due to poor Zawinul keyboards (I was never a fan of the Oberheim and coupled with the ARP synth, this creating an irritating sound. Poor stuff, probably their poorest so far! The following Pastorius-penned River People is almost a parody of what they could do, almost a slap in the face in the first hour fans, with a simplified funk groove and idiotic vocals. Next up is another terrible track Young And Fine (well the songwriting in itself is not at stake here, even if it is only a little more than a Groove & Jam track) with a horrible bass line, the same awful synths sonorities/tones/timbre as the previous track. Elders is a more interesting idea, but again the strange ideas for sounds of the title track resurfaces, but the eerie feel does make this track interesting.

The flipside opens with the title track, and with its successor the Pastorius-penned Punk Jazz, we get to see an extremely cold fusion, plagued with the same keyboards sounds, but both are overall some of the best tracks of this album, but wouldn’t even be fillers in previous albums of theirs. The short Pinocchio only lengthens my boredom, but is a valid piece of slow jazz, while the awful And Then closes the album very clumsily with some sung-jazz track ala Fiona Purim.

Not really saved, if only a bit by its flipside, this album is actually ruined by Zawinul’s poor choices of keyboard-sound palette, some rather cold songwriting, some over-the-top virtuosi playing, downright show-offy in Pastorius’ case. Of most of the 70’s WR albums, should you shun one of them, make sure it is this one. Nice, clever photomontage of drawings artwork, though, but it hardly makes sufficient grounds for progheads to indulge in this one.
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