Foreigner: Double Vision : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Double vision? One is hard pressed to discern even a single vision on the second Foreigner LP, which is one of the main reasons why this group's current ascendancy is so depressing. Where as their debut album was wholly concerned with the all-too-familiar, hard-rock Pursuit of the Female ("You search through the years," sang Lou Gramm, "to find a woman, not a girl") Double Vision is incredibly self-absorbed and nearly paralyzed by redoubled caution. The same successful riffs are repeated again here, smoothed out but pulsing with that Gothic pseudopassion so popular now among fans of Kansas, Styx, Meat Loaf et al.

Foreigner combines this approach with another, one that apparently taps a dark, neurotic need in the American rock psyche: the unslakable thirst for a loud, simplistic, English boogie band. Here the group continues a lineage that can be traced from Ten Years After through early Led Zeppelin to Bad Company, bands whose drone and thump was or is interrupted only by purple phrases and absurd metaphor mongering. Lots of groups have provided serviceable rock & roll from such a formula, but none of them was silly or prideful enough to allow the imagery and metaphors to dominate the music. Yet this is exactly what Foreigner has done on its new record.

The most obvious result is that Double Vision consists largely of ponderous ballads. Lead singer Lou Gramm, who on the first LP scraped away at a passable Paul Rodgers impersonation, now whips out the fine sandpaper for a husky Paul McCartney echo on "You're All I Am" and "I Have Waited So Long," typical exercises in solipsism. When the melodies are more melodramatic, as on "Double Vision" and "Spellbinder," Gramm's histrionic head tones threaten to capsize his sinuses as he moans about the suffering he must bear at the hands of wretched women.

As befits a bunch who, among them, have labored in over sixteen professional bands, Foreigner's collective persona is that of the Great Trod Upon, the nice guy who takes shit from women in heroic amounts. That's what the first album's hit, "Cold as Ice," was about, and Double Vision inundates us with the same rather pathetic theme. Lead guitarist Mick Jones, long since extracted from Spooky Tooth, has written or cowritten every song but one here (the best one, by the way), and his self-pity knows no limit: he's bursting with romantic agony. At least that's what the title metaphor seems to be getting at–all the pent-up frustration and rage felt by the narrator has found its pernicious outlet in a sort of ocular apoplexy. The rest of Jones' complaint is just incomprehensible: "No disguise/For that double vision...My double vision is the best of me." Huh?

Jones is also capable of quite a nasty vindictiveness on "Back Where You Belong," in which the feebleness of the melody fails to imbue his railing with the redeeming force of a catharsis: "You treat me like a fool.../I'm gonna send you back where you belong." Where to, Mick? The dog pound?

Such undisguised bitterness pervades Double Vision, and the record's only good moments arise from spurts of tight ensemble playing. But that's the least we could expect from such grizzled veterans. And songs like "Blue Morning, Blue Day" and "You're All I Am" do gratify in pleasantly odd ways. The surprise influence in this respect is the Beatles: Gramm's McCartney-like coo on "Blue Morning, Blue Day" is charming, while "Love Has Taken Its Toll" surges with a Revolver-era chorus–all snap and cleverness–as the guitars of Jones and Ed Gagliardi toss off a kinetic George Harrison/Paul McCartney blend.

But ultimately the group's skill is as mechanical as Mick Jones' paranoid misogyny. An instrumental is normally intended to show off a band's chops and smarts, yet the one provided here, "Tramontane," is puffy, quasi-ominous fluff, relying too heavily on Ian McDonald's spook-house organ effects. The tune's tense chords build and build but never break, and the accumulated suspense simply fades away.

What is most dispiriting about Foreigner is its patent lack of creative ambition. Not for an instant do we sense that these musicians are pushing themselves or trying to use their expertise to concoct something they find exciting. The emotions and motives asserted in their music are, when not just plain unbelievable, turgid and tawdry. Right now, the group's rhythms and Lou Gramm's singing tickle the ears of a lot of record buyers, but it's difficult to believe that this band will be able to keep its vast audience with more junk like this. We are not as dumb as Foreigner thinks we are.