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Year Of Release: 1977
Overall rating = 9
For such an intense picture of the Lonely Romantic Hero, they sure pick up some inane lyrics (and melodies).
Best song: FOOL FOR YOU ANYWAYTrack listing: 1) Feels Like The First Time; 2) Cold As Ice; 3) Starrider; 4) Headknocker; 5) Damage Is Done; 6) Long Long Way From Home; 7) Woman Oh Woman; 8) At War With The World; 9) Fool For You Anyway; 10) I Need You.
The year 1977 must have been really fucked up if this record really managed to sell the millions it is believed to have sold - although, if you ask me, I smell conspiracy in the air. Somebody convince me that the executive guys have been pulling our miserable leg all this time!.. Okay, so perhaps Foreigner was the best refuge for people who were (a) sick of progressive, (b) fed up with disco and (c) thoroughly unwilling to give in to the punk revolution due to compatibility problems (such as age limits). Here was a band that ROCKED, in a largely clean, inoffensive, and non-shock way, and it had these whoopin' huge arena-rock choruses and this lead singer who's so masculine and so romantic at the time. As an added bonus, you don't have to listen a dozen times to this stuff in order to "get" the songs, and yet they don't celebrate either consciously brainless "phallosimplicity" like KISS or subconsciously brainless "machosimplicity" like Bad Company. And to top it at all, there's pompous artsy synthesizers a-plenty and sensitive, highly emotional vocal harmonies all over the place. Isn't that, like, the recipe number one for a record-hungry public in 1977?
It has always been a great, inexhaustible source of fascination me how the Ian McDonald who plays such an important part on this album could actually be the same Ian McDonald who had once played saxes and Mellotrons on King Crimson's debut - or the same Ian McDonald that was responsible for the vastly underrated prog beauty of the McDonald & Giles album. Either the guy was seriously stoned when he teamed up with Mick Jones and Lou Gramm, or he was so goddamn broke he just couldn't resist the appeal - or maybe he saw the band as a practical joke all the way, at least until they started garnering millions. Then again, I could ask the same question about Phil Collins. Or Alan Parsons. Or Rod Stewart. When you're selling out, you don't really ask yourself why - questions like these would only take your time and energy, and you need those for selling out effectively. I needn't tell you that Foreigner's debut is one of the blandest records I've ever forced myself to sit through. No, wait, that's incorrect. I never really forced myself. Fair is fair, and this music isn't exactly what I'd call "ugly" or "vomit-inducing" or "causing the author to engage in various lame outbursts of toilet humour". It's just your basic arena-rock, and one that's careful enough to stay away from all excesses. Lou Gramm's vocals are loud and proud, manly and vibrating, professional, but not very personal - nothing too charmful about them, a la gracious hoarseness of Paul Rogers, and nothing too stinky, either, like the hysterically dumb yelps of Mr Coverdale. Mick Jones' guitar playing is solid, and he intentionally renounces long flashy solos, going for structure and - yuck - melodicity instead of speed, rhythmic punch and technical gimmicks (I haven't been able to find one tricky special guitar effect on the entire record; they are actually purer in attitude than Bad Company!). And let's give 'em their due; they're actually trying to write real songs, so it's only natural that the album has a somewhat nice flow and never bleeds on my ears all that much. At this point the stock of nice and kind words draws to a perilous close, though. The main problem with this record - and all the following ones - lies in its horrendous lack of that life-saving magic potion I call "adequacy". Now, in the original review of the record I just wrote "the hooks are rotten" and left it at that; but it wasn't really what I wanted to say. You see, the hooks really aren't "rotten". At best, they're "rotten" in retrospect because for Foreigner, the art of songwriting seems to have frozen in space somewhere around the early Seventies; all of the songs are defiantly "retro". But since when has that been a problem for me? Retro can be done great, and besides, with all the punk and New Wave acts coming up in droves, having somebody doing "retro" stuff and actually getting significant amounts of moolah for it would be satisfying in some ways, wouldn't it? And the songs - the melodies, they're okay, aren't they? Nothing special, and if you're well versed in Sixties/Seventies rock, you'll be recognizing familiar chord sequences and, occasionally, (sub)conscious quotations all over the place, but that's hardly "B-A-D", isn't it? Verse, chorus, middle-eight, guitar solo, some emotion, some professionalism, what's up with that? Say, isn't it fun that I'm looking at the ten song titles right now and I can sing every single one in my head? "FEELS LIKE THE FIIIIIRST TIME!" "You're as cold as ice!" "STARRIIIIIIIIDEEEER!" "HEADKNOCKER!" "AND I NEED YOU! AND I NEEE-, EEE-, -EEEEEED YOU!" Fun! I can go on like this for a long time, you know. So it isn't the isolated quality of these hooks that bugs me. It is the general feel of the record. These six guys come up with a bunch of simplistic, perfectly average pop songs - an area in which they have loads of competition - and seem to be passing them off like it were a Bizet opera or something. Everything, beginning with McDonald's symphonic keyboards and ending with Gramm's overwrought vocal deliveries, plays like cheap, fake drama. It doesn't help matters much that the lyrics are abysmal; any album that opens with the lines 'I would climb any mountain/Sail across a stormy sea' sung the way you'd expect Tristan confess his love to Isolda deserves to be knocked out cold in the first round. But I don't even need to look at the lyrics sheet to know that. The banal melodies, the fake jewellery of the arrangements, the "lonely idiot romantic" vocal stylistics are well enough. And it's a pity, really, because some of these songs... well, I think I could envisage some of these songs to better effect. 'Cold As Ice', for instance, is interesting. There's the "chorus" part (the 'you're as cold as ice you're willing to sacrifice' bit) that's half-decent music hall, and there's the completely different signature on the verses which are a bit Elton-John-piano-ish, and the delicate crescendo and whoops the music hall again. But the "bathos", no, no, I can't stand it. Maybe if you had a different guy purring over this thing rather than bellowing, and got rid of the Guitar Storm... or maybe just redid it as one of these completely lonesome acoustic ballads... and, of course, rewrote the lyrics? See, there's potential, but they're not willing to use it. It's gotta be blasted out loud, because if it isn't, all the young punks are gonna shut you down. Ain't the right age for acoustic subtlety. It's no coincidence that I finally settled on 'Fool For You Anyway' as the best tune on the album, because it's the only one that partially breaks away from the "power rocker / power ballad" formula. That's not to say I'm in love with the song or anything. But it's a decent, if at times also bombastic, country ballad that wouldn't look out of place on a James Taylor album. It even features some nice vocals from Lou the Poo - the sweet falsetto on the "and I tried to be so strong" line, for instance, comes out of nowhere and is a very pretty touch; and so are Mick Jones' acoustic solos, inobtrusive and respectfully quiet. And it's the kind of style that seems to be coming to these guys naturally and without too much strain. So why the heck didn't they concentrate more on it? And why did they have to "compensate" for its humble prettiness by going to the other extreme and recording something as maliciously hideous as the 'quasi-progressive' sci-fi blunder of 'Starrider'? Isn't that, like, one of the worst songs ever recorded by anybody on this star? In the end, there are exactly three songs that, in my eyes, manage to not merge melodic mediocrity with uber-arrogant pompousness: 'Fool...', 'Cold As Ice', and the straightahead, unabashed barroom rock of 'Headknocker' (although even that song, the way I see it, does not even begin to deserve to have James Dean and especially 'Louie Louie' mentioned in its lyrics). The others I will refrain from discussing individually because the word "individual" might get angry with me if I tried to use it in a Foreigner review, and I don't wanna provoke it. Who knows, it might just run away to Florida and where will I be without its help with my Frank Zappa reviews?
Year Of Release: 1978
A little better, Foreigner even go as far on here as to actually write one or two good songs - no mean feat considering that the only tune I can vaguely remember off the debut by this time is 'Cold As Ice'. Now before you go questioning me about how on Earth I ended up reviewing Foreigner, let me tell you this: I'm glad I ended up reviewing Foreigner. Remember, the good, the innovative, the unexpected, the original, the eyebrow-raising, the mind-opening can only truly exist when put back to back with the poor, the conservative, the predictable, the derivative, the yawn-inducing, the brain-destructing. Now that I look all over my site, I can truly find barely a single band that I'd truly call utterly generic and absolutely worthless. Foreigner are, like, the perfect foil. True love found at last!
But back to Double Vision. What a great opening sound! Solid four-four unnerving drumbeat! And a one-note rhythm guitar that goes chugga-chugga-chugga, just waiting for the listener to tune in from the first second. And I'm pretty serious, I really like the five seconds or so with which this album opens. Unfortunately, then it becomes 'Hot Blooded', one of the band's biggest hits and one of its dumbest songs. Switch Lou Gramm's voice for Paul Stanley's, add just an ounce more dirty distortion to those guitar riffs (or maybe not, after all, Kiss never had as much distortion as their fans would like to pretend they did), and here's a good tune to blow your brains out on Dressed To Kill or Love Gun. I do like the second song, though, I confess. I think 'Blue Morning Blue Day' is actually well-written; surprisingly, it's also a piano-based tune along the lines of 'Cold As Ice', which makes me suggest Foreigner might have made a far more successful career in vaudeville/music hall rather than a bland "hard rock" outfit. That chorus is almost annoyingly catchy (like certain Boney M songs I could name), and I have to give them props for that; most of the time they couldn't even achieve annoying catchiness. And it's pretty funny how Lou Gramm threatens to become obnoxious with every note he hits and yet never really crosses that line. Really, the guy deserved a better band. Out of the rockers, there's the title track which I would single out; one of their faster songs, and that double riff interplay in the beginning really works well - the grit factor gets counted in. Many would puke at the pseudo-disco chorus, but I personally like how the rocking verses segue directly into it and how it smoothly goes out back to the double riff interplay. In the band's defense, no outfit that sells millions of records can be said to lack talent entirely (at least, not until the modern world, when N'Sync and Britney Spears have appeared to shatter that belief forever); 'Double Vision' proves these guys could have made a decent tune if they wanted to, they just really didn't care. It's like, "okay boys, let's concentrate, we have to put at least one interesting track among all that dreck we're shoving down the decadent generation's throats". They even go as far as to insert an instrumental, the slightly prog-sounding 'Tramontane'. "Prog-sounding" is more than a friggin' hyperbole; the entire tune is built upon the endless repetition of one main theme which is very simple musically (a seven-note synth riff, to be exact), but on the positive side, it's a nice and moody sounding theme, and with a little bit of work could have served as a basis for a significant prog epic. Here it just kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. No Foreigner fan would really want stuff like that. Maybe it was Ian McDonald, ashamed of his dirty deeds and trying to repent. Everything else is entirely forgettable, even if rarely offensive. 'Spellbinder' is just as pompous and dinky as 'Starrider', and pretty acoustic ballads like 'Have Waited So Long' and 'Back Where You Belong' are only redeemed by really really nice singing. Dumb pedestrian rockers like 'Love Has Taken Its Toll', however, can only be redeemed by exercising the understandable function of filler on a record exercising the understandable function of a medium to assist the band members in their noble quest to strengthen the record industry and increase their own financial stature. Well, as Gabriel Knight once said, "I admire anyone that can actually make a living". I'll have to agree.
Year Of Release: 1979
Ian McDonald's last contribution to this abomination. The platinum boys of rock are back to throw in another batch of hastily written, poorly produced, routinely performed garbage which adds nothing to their already well-established legacy of two or three acceptable tunes. Well, okay, not exactly "nothing"; I'd be lying if I told you there was absolutely nothing worth hearing on the record. 'Women', for instance. Now that's a really fun piece of macho posturing, something of a cross between Lou Reed (I'd say Lou Gramm is consciously working on his Reed emulation here) and Mick Jagger ('Some Girls' springs to mind immediately) - but the best thing is that it's a really lightweight and unpretentious boogie, with a steady one note bassline and a really fun gruff AC/DC-like riff and really unnerving piano backup and all. Sure must have been fun performing this one live.
On the other end of the line, then, we have 'Modern Day', which, true to its name, sounds far more modern, with Carsish synthesizers bulging out of the speakers and a thoroughly non-bluesy soud to everything. Again, this is in full accordance with my theory of talent actually present in the band, but then again, maybe they just happened to be on a half-hour roll. And to tell you the truth, the chord changes in the song produce a rather banal acoustic effect on me - rather it's the intuitive realization that this is a bit too soft and personal to qualify as a corny stadium rock anthem which works. The bad news, then, is that Head Games starts to really abuse the power ballad thing. Just as you've been moderately inspired by 'Modern Day', you get your face plunged in a bucket of artificial tears with the "heart-wrenching" ballad 'Blinded By Science'. From the moment I saw that ugly title - hey, according to me science is one of the few things you cannot get blinded by - I knew it was gonna hurt, and it did, but not because of the lyrics, rather just because it's one of those 1-2-3-4 things that... uhhh.... well, you know. And it's soooo pathetic, easily the most puffed-up song Foreigner did to that point. Geez, boy, Lou Gramm doesn't have a bad voice, how come he condescends to wasting it on this third-rate soap opera soundtrack? Truthfully, not a single other song comes close to the puke level established by this 'Blinded By Power Chords' idiocy, but 'Love On The Telephone' is almost as icky (and I am still questioning myself over whether a line like "friday, sixday, saturday" can be considered violation of good taste or not. It all probably depends on whether that word got on there intentionally or whoever wrote the goddamn lyrics just thought it was kinda natural for sixday to come after friday. I mean, with a band like Foreigner, can you really count upon rational everyday conduct?). And everything else just recycles the formula to a tee. The same gruff rhythms, the same chuckling keyboards/heavenly synths, and a lot of enthusiastic choruses that take themselves pretty seriously because their authors are convinced they're pretty catchy when in fact they aren't (the verses aren't even considered attention-meriting by the band itself, so it seems). If you wanna fool around and try to classify this material or something, then you'll see that 'Seventeen' pretends to be gross and raunchy, with a hard-rockin' riff, and 'I'll Get Even With You' is more of a "power-pop" number again, but unless you pay serious attention, you won't even be aware of the fact. I guess this is what some might call "stylistic diversity" for Foreigner, much as, for instance, 'Hell's Bells', 'Shoot To Thrill', 'Have A Drink On Me', and 'Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' might be called definite proof of AC/DC's stylistic diversity (hey, a heavy metal Satanic number, a hard rock macho number, a sincere socially based reference, and a loud and proud rock'n'roll anthem! And they're all on the same album! Go figure!). The hits... I'm not sure what were the hits on here, but wasn't 'Dirty White Boy' one? I do like the first fifteen seconds of the song - they sure knew how to get going - but nothing after those fifteen seconds, and then again, Aerosmith did the fluent rockin' opening better with 'Toys In The Attic' anyway, now that's a cool song. There's also the title track where a desperate scream "HEAD GAMES!" is supposed to constitute a hook, but I guess this might just as well be the optimal moment to shut up about the album and move to something better. Besides, I'm hungry (but that's not what a Foreigner fan might think, not at all!).
Year Of Release: 1981
What a nice short minimalistic title. Can we say brevity is the sister of wit on that one? Well, more like a wicked stepmother in this particular case.
That said, I am still ready to award Foreigner with the title of "Best Band To Have The First Five Seconds Of Its Records Kick Ass". Okay, not five, more like a whoppin' fourteen. For the first fourteen seconds of the album, I'm in Heaven. Mick Jones captures a phenomenal groove out there, with a crushing cyclical riff that could have, in the hands of Accept or Judas Priest or any decent heavy metal band, transformed the song into a true classic. Unfortunately, fourteen seconds later it goes away, replaced by a major key generic blues-rock rhythm and Lou Gramm's usual hysteria. It comes in later, of course, but by that time the magic is over, and you're too disgusted to play air guitar any more. Oh, the song is 'Nightlife', but you probably knew that. Because it's Foreigner's 4, you know, the one that got the most airplay and sold like gazillions of copies and yielded boatloads of hit singles. And just as a minor warning, the All-Music Guide review of that album was one of the most disgusting things I've ever read in my life. Yeah sure, Foreigner were at the top of their game at the time, but what game was that? Bridge or strip poker? It is all about the attitude, of course. Essentially, once you've given the album enough listens (and Lord knows I have), some melodies start climbing out. And by the end of my first day with the record, I've reached the conclusion that 4 is indeed Foreigner's best album because every song has, like, a germ of a musical idea in it. It's not like these guys didn't know how to piece the chords together, in fact, for many of these songs they had pieced them together much better than for the previous three albums. There are even hooks in some of the material. Unfortunately, in order to "convert" these songs to listenable mood, much work needs to be done. First of all, somebody ought either to teach the band to write better lyrics or teach Lou Gramm not to treat them like The Song Of Songs. 'I wish she'd come back tonight, like a star shining bright' - come on now, only the laziest, most illiterate critic in the world could resist the temptation to bash the band to hell when they seem to fall upon every lyrical cliche that has ever existed in this world. And that's only half of the trouble; the other half is how Mr Gramm, with each and every one of his intonations, tries to convince us like he's making some huge emotional statement with this pap. Second, somebody should eliminate these forkin' synths. The most generic synth tones in the world, and this at a time when the Cars have already provided the "synth revolution" in pop music. Not that I'm saying using Cars-like synthesizers would have necessarily benefited the band, it's just that the keyboard work on the album is so boring and so dated it seems amazing they were so much stuck in the Seventies. And finally, don't even try to convince me (not that you'd want to, it's just a figure of speech) that there's an ounce of energy present in any of these songs. It's simply amazing how Foreigner have earned the reputation of a "hard rock" band with this fluff. There's nothing on this album that could offend the ears of your great-grandmother, unless lyrics like 'I want to taste it while it's hot' count. Wow, what an amazing, unbelievably mature metaphor. Not even enlisting "Mutt" Lange to produce this album really helped. Sharpening and refining the already classic sound of AC/DC was one thing, and sharpening and refining the yawn-inducing sound of Foreigner is another thing - it just makes you yawn sharper. Oh well, at least, like I said, there are tinges of compositional solidity every now and then. Songs like 'Luanne' and 'Urgent' are moderately catchy, and the latter even adds an atypically tasteful sax solo from Junior Walker. The only song I'd call total garbage is 'Juke Box Hero'; probably irritated by the laurels of Bad Company's 'Shooting Star', they decided to make their own rock star anthem, only they took out all the negative sides (like dying from overdosing and similar little details) and all the melodic power, making a song that rests entirely upon a set of power chords and power screams. "JUST ONE GUITA-A-A-A-A-R!" If I happen to hear it on the radio one day, bad things are gonna happen. Boy, classic rock radio sure rests on some doubtful material. And that's about it. I'm not gonna discuss the sappy power ballads or any other rockers - there's nothing to discuss. On the positive side, I'm pretty sure Lou and the boys thought they were saving rock'n'roll or something like that, saving it from the onslaught of New Wave and Europop and suchlike. So they acted upon a generous motive, you know. Now if only somebody would have come up to them in 1981 and reminded that true rock'n'roll wasn't about inoffensive mid-tempo riffage or pretentiously sung thrice recycled lyrics, I could be much happier today.
Year Of Release: 1984
I guess the only respect in which an epochal band like Foreigner hadn't really caught up with such pathetic also-rans as Pink Floyd and the Who until this album are the layout periods - but surely a three-year gap between 4 and this one should have resulted in their absolute masterpiece?
Some people actually believed that so fervently that they elevated 'I Wanna Know What Love Is', present on here, to the status of absolute masterpiece to end all masterpieces... some rumours actually have it that Sting of all people changed his mind about the band upon hearing this song. Yeah, it's not like Sting's musical instincts are revered that much in the "tasteful" musical community, but still - why? There's one really nice thing about this song - that five-note bass/synth-line that separates the tacts. It's really moody and even a little scary, and a good invention; but once the song dips into its overblown generic-power-ballad chorus, it just totally goes for banal shit. Might as well listen to the Scorpions, or, well, there's tons of candidates for that part. And Foreigner always had plenty of power ballads, so it's not like they're doing something different. Maybe it's that bombastic female backing choir that counts, I dunno. Doesn't take a lot of effort to get a choir to sing you some backup, not if you got the cash to go along with it. No, really, the reason why this album gets the same rating as 4, even if there's far less catchy material on it, is that they changed their style a bit in the gruff rockin' part. The All-Music Guide may trash a song like 'Reaction To Action' for all they want, but there's no denying that Mick Jones' riffage on the number is pretty good, in the traditional flashy cock-rock sense, that is. In fact, a good bunch of these songs are just generic, but fun guitar-bass-drums rockers, with no "artsy" pretentions and no poisonous synths to spike your Coke. Better and more memorable than KISS, more hard-rockin' than Bad Company... nothing to go wild about, but some relatively solid headbanging material that urges you to bang it 'round, not much else. "High art" this sure is not, nor does it pretend to be. Like I said, 'Reaction To Action' is a mildly cool funky stop-and-start riff-rocker; even better is 'Stranger In My Own House', where they do use the synths, but only on occasion, to produce a scary atmospheric background (in the introduction to the sound there's almost an industrial feedback-choked synth growling). The chorus is really good as well; Mick Jones sure can have a mean, if rather primitive, funk-metal groove going on, and Lou Gramm screams his head off in the most positive way; hey, I've always said that guy had a good singing voice. In short, the more they try to rock out on here, the better it is, because for once in their life, something clicks within the brain of Mr Jones and he's actually willing to let his guitar completely overshadow the dippy synth backing and you can tap your toe and bash your head against the wall and whatever. The opening 'Tooth And Nail' and the closing 'She's Too Tough' are a little bit heavier on synth treatment than the others, but still the guitar rules supreme, and there's no stupid sissy emotions involved. This is RAAAWK OUT, man, and the riffs are moderately good. Unfortunately, whenever they reconvert to ballad mode, the shit hits the fan - that moody bassline on 'I Wanna Know What The Secret Of I Wanna Know What Love Is Really Is' is about the best compliment I can give on this section. Hookless pathetic crap like 'Down On Love' can only be listened to once unless you're an MTV-addicted robot, and while it's only too fortunate that a song called 'Two Different Worlds' does not deal with third world problems (hey, this is not a Sting record, even if I guess judging by his reactions to it he wouldn't have minded if it were!), that doesn't prevent it from being a totally forgettable piece of synth-addled bathos; Lou, you probably wanted to save it through your singing power alone, well lemme tell ya, not even Ray Charles could have done that. And while 'That Was Yesterday' was a hit and all, I just can't stand that hideous Casio sound which comes out of my speakers as if I were playing a third-rate arcade game. Cripes, at least you could have thought of a more complex melody - don't they teach similar passages in kindergarten? Oh well, it's only too understandable that Agent Provocateur was Foreigner's last bit of big commercial success - big riff-rockers were going out of fashion, and the synth-driven ballads are soooo dated to their time, almost glued to it, I'd say, that I can't even imagine anybody who wasn't actively trying to be "cool" in the early Eighties still listening to this tripe. Can you?