Foreigner - 4
July 2 1981
Foreigner
4
Genre: Classic Radio Staple Rock
Allen’s rating: 4.5 out of 5
Allen’s rating: 4.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Night Life
Juke Box Hero
Break It Up
Waiting for Girl Like You
Luanne
(Yep. That’s side one. The whole thing.)
Urgent
Gonna try something.
“I want to know what love is.”
There.
Read that line.
Now, read it again.
Now. Go about your day.
Come back to this review in about 4 hours and tell me that you haven’t sung that chorus over and over to yourself.
Yep. Foreigner is responsible for the single most ear wormiest of ear worms in history.
And that’s a lot of 4.
It’s one of those records that I should have handed off to someone else but took for myself and there will be a couple more in 1981. In this case it’s not because it meant anything to me. Quite the contrary. I was one of those kids who eschewed the likes of Foreigner back in the day.
But when I pulled this record up for the initial retrospective I gave it 4.5 stars and I really wanted to see if it held up or if I was just being generous or apologetic.
Because once you hear “Juke Box Hero” or even just read the title, that tune comes back at you, hard. Can you avoid singing along? I can’t.
In many ways Foreigner 4 is a companion to Billy Squier’s Don’t Say Know. Just a good rock record chock full of catchy tunes.
Never heard “Break It Up”? Yes you have. You know you have. And, if not, that lick sounds so damned familiar that it’s like a lost friend who comes to visit and brings you a nice babka.
“Waiting for a Girl Like You” is like one big preamble to “I Want to Know What Love Is”. Damn, Mick Jones and Lou Gramm had their fingers on the fret-pulse of delicious ear candy.
If it’s not enough that the entire first side if chock full of unstoppable tracks…Side Two opens with aNOTher ear worm: “Urgent”. You might want to hate it, with it’s Styxian “Too Much Time” bite but, fuck it, it’s unhateable.
There’s no doubt that a lot of these tunes go on about 30-45 seconds longer than they need to but, honestly, unlike a LOT of 80s songs that do the same thing (looking at you, Adam Ant), I wouldn’t cut these down. It’s a big album that is made to fill your house when blasted through the JBLs when spun on your Technics and on all those pistons it fires.
Does it Peter out toward the end? A little. But the album is a classic. I wasn’t wrong, it turns out.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/4-expanded-version/285143156
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