3E Presents: Foreigner Week

If someone had told me that in August of 1981, I'd state that a Foreigner song with a scorching Junior Walker sax break might be the best damned car-radio single of the summer, I'd have advised him to ease up on the black beauties. But "Urgent" is terrific. (Considering these guys' pallid output over the years, how'd they ever convince Walker to get involved?) I'm not trying to be nasty, yet I've always thought that Foreigner was a group worth ignoring rather than criticizing. Their earlier hits, "Cold as Ice," "Dirty White Boy" and "Double Vision," hold up as reasonably good rockers in the Bad Company-Van Halen vein, but they're not nearly as neat as the quality stuff on Bad Company's first two albums. And all of the above bands pale in comparison to those they struggle to imitate: Free and vintage Led Zeppelin.

Lou Gramm is no Paul Rodgers or Robert Plant (which might be just as well these days), yet he sings the hell out of "Urgent," a metallic, predatory confessional about sexual obsession, steeped in steamy nocturnal cravings. The instrumentation is crisp and spare, and Walker punctuates the cynical seductive frenzy like the master that he is, cutting loose at the moment the sap is spurting with a rippling solo that ranks with his finest work.

How Foreigner managed to crank out such a marvelous backseat anthem and then sink into utter mediocrity on the rest of 4 is mildly intriguing, but – shrug – what are you gonna do? I mean, without Gramm's vocals, there's nothing to distinguish the group's sound from that of a dozen other middling-to-hard rock acts. Indeed, "Break It Up" sounds like a bar band imitating Queen, 10cc and, only incidentally, Foreigner.

From Rolling Stone's review of 4