for the third time<\/a> in two years; frankly, until it came time for our May 2006 arena rock retrospective, I probably hadn\u2019t thought about the band three times in the last 20 years. They\u2019re just so, well, predictable.<\/p>\nBut since founding member \/ lead guitarist \/ songwriter Mick Jones reformed the group with an almost all-new lineup in 2005, they\u2019ve been touring steadily and are now signed with Rhino and playing shows with fellow 80s AOR refugee Bryan Adams. The next logical move, naturally, is the group\u2019s umpteenth hits collection, this time packaged with a chaser of new material.<\/p>\n
Foreigner started out as in many ways the prototypical arena rock band, a group whose songs seemed to hold little purpose beyond embedding an unremarkable guitar riff on the back of your brain pan for three minutes and getting out while your money was still in their pockets. Their commercial bent became even more pronounced after the success of their 1981 smash \u201cWaiting For A Girl Like You,\u201d which became the template for a series of increasingly overwrought power ballads through the rest of the 80s and 90s.<\/p>\n
The first disc of this two-CD set, covering Foreigner\u2019s 1977-81 heyday, features virtually all of the band\u2019s strongest moments. The hooks that anchor tunes like \u201cFeels Like The First Time,\u201d \u201cCold As Ice\u201d and \u201cDouble Vision\u201d are simply inescapable, and \u201cLong Long Way From Home\u201d might be the best cut the band ever recorded, with its urgent Lou Gramm vocals and complex arrangement. \u201cBlue Morning, Blue Day\u201d is another sleeper whose melody sticks in your head for days. And \u201cUrgent\u201d might have been a hit in any era with its brilliant mix-and-match arrangement, featuring Thomas Dolby\u2019s pulsing synths split in two by a ripping sax solo from the immortal Junior Walker. <\/p>\n
For all the obvious appeal of hook-laden tunes like \u201cHot Blooded\u201d and \u201cJuke Box Hero,\u201d though, I still have trouble getting past the fact that these guys are just comically bad lyricists. When they\u2019re not busy busting laughable macho man poses like \u201cNight Life\u201d (\u201cIt could get kinda rough\u2026Time to separate the men from the boys\u201d), they\u2019re playing the victim card with woe-is-me numbers like \u201cBreak It Up,\u201d or the clueless skirt-chasers on the tongue-in-cheek yet still embarrassing \u201cWomen.\u201d \u201cHot Blooded\u201d itself features this hilarious nugget toward the end of the fade: \u201cYou\u2019re makin\u2019 me sing \/ For your sweet, sweet thing\u2026\u201d (Did you *really* just say that out loud?)<\/p>\n
The second half of this two-disc set is even more uneven. Kicking off with the miles-over-the-top power-ballad-plus-gospel-choir \u201cI Want To Know What Love Is,\u201d the music immediately stumbles as tinny, flat, synth-heavy 80s production values take over and the Jones-Gramm partnership frays before our ears. There are punchy moments in tunes like \u201cThat Was Yesterday\u201d and \u201cTooth And Nail,\u201d but the lyrics no longer carry even comic relief value and the production is uniformly awful, making bland, clich\u00e9-ridden cuts like \u201cDown On Love\u201d and \u201cCan\u2019t Wait\u201d difficult to sit through. When you reach the tunes from 1991\u2019s Unusual Heat<\/i>, featuring Johnny Edwards in the lead vocal slot, the band energy picks up and the riffs get bigger and rawer, but the music is ultimately no less generic.<\/p>\n
The final four cuts feature the current band lineup, a sort of Mick Jones All-Star Band including lead vocalist Kelly Hansen (Hurricane), bassist Jeff Pilson (Dokken), drummer Jason Bonham (Bonham, Led Zeppelin), and 90s recruits Jeff Jacobs on keyboards and Thom Gimbel on everything else. The current lineup\u2019s new studio cut \u201cToo Late\u201d sounds like a song out of time, a catchy tune that could easily have appeared on Double Vision<\/i> or Head Games<\/i> circa 1979-1980. The live acoustic version of \u201cSay You Will\u201d is a highlight, stripping away every awful 80s production touch from the studio original and putting the melody and vocals out front where they belong. The live \u201cStarrider\u201d packs appropriate punch and the \u201cJuke Box Hero\/Whole Lotta Love\u201d medley works surprisingly well, showcasing a group playing with renewed spark and — it seems — plenty of mileage left in it.<\/p>\n
It would be a stretch to call No End In Sight<\/i> essential, especially given the number of collections Foreigner has on the market already. But the new material is decent enough, and let\u2019s face it: guilty pleasures are better than none at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7739],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-41040","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-foreigner","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41040"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}