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Huey Lewis & the News - Small World Audio CD

A fair review of the Huey Lewis & the News "Small World" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Huey Lewis & the News reviews here, or go back to the Huey Lewis & the News tabs.

Huey Lewis & the News Band: Huey Lewis & the News
Title: Small World
Rating:
Release Date: 1990-10-25
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Small World, Pt. 1 2: Old Antone's 3: Perfect World 4: Bobo Tempo 5: Small World, Pt. 2 6: Walking With the Kid 7: World to Me 8: Better Be True 9: Give Me the Keys (And I'll Drive You Crazy) 10: Slammin'

Needs a Real Review
Only gets more than one star because of Perfect World being a great song and I love Huey over all too much. Just reviewing because these are way too positive and a dose of reality is needed. The rest is abysmal if you want to consider this a rock n roll album which is what I thought I was buying at the time some 20 years ago. It should have had a warning label on it or something for me that it wasn't such a thing.

Anyway, Huey was one of, if not the most overplayed radio band of the 80's from Sports to the first single off this - Perfect World. They could do no wrong they must have thought to have thought this "artsy" stuff is what the fans wanted to hear. Well the fans heard this complete departure to the first 4 albums, the two Back to the Future songs, and the lead single for this and it was none to pleasing to us meat and potato rockin lovers who were their fan base.

All I can say is maybe this is just too good and my pedestrian tastes are too unsophisticated to notice the brilliant intricacies and artistic arrangements of these masterpieces. Maybe someday I will gather more musical wisdom and appreciate it like the other enlightened reviewers. But I really doubt it. And that's probably because Rock N Roll has nothing to do with that kind of high falooting nonsense. And before this Huey understood that.

Words to describe this effort: Indulgent. Pompous. Patronizing. Misguided. Boring. Appalling. Career Suicide.


Big Ambitions, Small World
The result was their fifth and most ambitious album, "Small World. After being pegged as a party band for yuppies, Huey Lewis and The News decided it was time to make the big statement. " Unfortunately, the MTV and party crowd wasn't all that interested in The News's musical ambitions and made this a relative failure, only charting as high as #11 and producing one top ten single, "Perfect World. " By contrast, Fore! hit the top spot with five top ten singles and two number ones, while Sports was the band's first chart topper and yielded four top tenners.

One of the main reasons was the lack of 'good-time rock and roll' type numbers. "Give Me The Keys and I'll Drive You Crazy" was the obvious nod to this crowd, and it sounds like Lewis could have written it in his sleep. The rest of the album flirted with jazz ("Small World Pt 2," complete with Stan Getz's sax solo), deep zydeco "Bobo Tempo" and the bluesy "Old Antones. " (Antones being a legendary Texas music club. ) The music was more sophisticated than "Power Of Love: fans might have been ready for, but Lewis has been quoted as saying "Small World" is a personal favorite in his discography. A step off the commercial goldmines of their last three albums, "Small World" is still a decent HL&TN record.


SMALL WORLD-BIG ALBUM
Lewis and Co. Small World appeared around 1988 and had to top the two previous albums by Mr. I was at this time tiring of Huey Lewis and did not even bother to listen to it. MISTAKE!!! This is quite possibly their best. The whole album just rocks from beginning to end and I am looking at it from a stand point of just having bought it in 2008! The production is 80's, but it still works wonderfully due to great musicians and good song writing. Amazing.


Underappreciated but Excellent
But that kind of creativity and risk-taking is what makes this album a great achievement for an extremely popular band of the day, and sets it apart from the rest of their catalog. Huey Lewis & the News took big risks in making this album, like hiring jazz saxophonist Stan Getz as a sideman, experimenting with zydeco arrangements, and doing some nearly all-instrumental tracks that were very unlikely to become hits.

The songs here are sometimes jazzy, sometimes funky, often rooted in classic 1960s rock, but consistently good. In this sense, Small World shares a musical pedigree with some early Santana and Chicago albums that had a lot of horns, organ, world music influences, and broke the boundaries of mainstream rock. There is a high level of variety, musicmanship, and just plain fun in this album.

I wrote to Huey Lewis years after the album was released and let him know how much I liked it, even though I considered myself mostly a jazz fan. Mr. Lewis actually wrote back and expressed how much he enjoyed working on the album and collaborating with Getz. If you like music that defies category and takes a few risks (and succeeds), give this one a try. You may be pleasantly surprised.


Excellent album
This record is all about good songs and roots music. I like the production , I like the instrumental performances and I like the arrangements. The hit single "Perfect world " is a song you can listen a hundred times and still enjoy . "The world to me " is simply put a wonderful ballad and "Better be true " is really great . The music fashions will come and go but this record that I first listened to in 1990 can be heard today with the same pleasure.
How many bands can achieve that ?
The secret of Huey Lewis and the News is that they are a natural rock and r&b band , so much the better.
This is a classic, forget the critics.


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