Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Foreigner
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2014
Duration: 76:54
Rating: 2/5
If any major rock band has been making fools of its fans in recent years, it’s definitely Foreigner. A pile of compilations of one kind or another, stuffed with the biggest hits, tagged with some anniversary or milestone celebration, now for this reason, now for that, and a third one besides. A new studio album, though? Nowhere in sight! Still not. We’ve been waiting since 2009. Meanwhile, the band tours non-stop. Now acoustic, now electric, with a mostly fixed set of their biggest hits.
And on top of all that comes yet another album with the words »best of« in the title, which brings a whole new kind of deception. It’s a live document that got its name because at two consecutive shows in the middle of New Jersey, Foreigner played a set with a few more songs from their famous album »4« (1981) than they usually do. That’s how it ended up as »best of Foreigner 4«, while the »and more« tacked on at the end means the band’s radio evergreens got thrown onto the record too, of course. Naturally, it couldn’t go any other way, since this document has to be sold successfully as well.
The whole thing would be perfectly credible, despite the outrage at the start of this piece, if the band hadn’t resorted to »adjusting« and »prettifying« the live recording for the official release. The setlist of each of the two nights the record is drawn from had 15 songs. Played in a completely different order than on the official release. What does that mean? The band obviously tidied up the intros and outros of the songs. So we get just 12 tracks, with breaks in between, or in other words a »castrated« live document that can’t deliver the real energy and atmospheric punch, the kind that would be as authentic a replica as possible of the live vibe on October 3 and 4, 2013, in the middle of New Jersey at the prestigious venue The Music Box at the Borgata hotel (Atlantic City).
That the great veterans of Foreigner sound phenomenal on stage even in their later years is no longer news. Kelly Hansen once again squeezed out his fantastic vocal maximum, and the band enriched its stage sound with the touch of great sensitivity from guitar wizard Bruce Watson, who joined Foreigner in 2011 as a permanent guitarist. They decided to bring him in because of the health troubles of band leader Mick Jones.
When you listen to the tracks on this document, it’s clear Foreigner played flawlessly once again. The sound is excellent, and the sonic picture is brilliantly laid out. The low end pulses warm and full, and Jeff Pilson remains outstanding as a bassist, in the virtuous sound he produces and in how much space his bass covers down low. The contrasts between keyboards and guitar riffs are once again perfectly stacked, the vocal harmonies work with all the know-how that Foreigner have in the pinky of their left hand, and Tom Gimbel’s sax in Urgent once again gives you goosebumps and delivers one of the highlights of the live document! So no sonic or performance slip-ups to be found!
All the more infuriating, then, that the band decided not to release this document in the spirit of authenticity. The setlists of the two nights were even different enough that Foreigner could have put out a whole crate of extra CDs and offered two live documents from two concert nights, with no cuts and without deliberately shuffling the tracks together. On each night’s setlist, two songs were acoustic. The official document has just one acoustic track.
Rating? Failing grade! You could sort of let the band off the hook if, since »Can’t Slow Down« up to 2014, they’d released at least one studio album, or if in the same stretch of time they hadn’t burdened the market with a plethora of best-of compilations. Foreigner passed the point long ago where trading on past glory becomes downright tasteless.
Lineup
Mick Jones – guitar
Kelly Hansen – vocals
Jeff Pilson – bass guitar
Tom Gimbel – flute, guitar, keyboards, saxophone
Michael Bluestein – keyboards
Chris Frazier – drums
Bruce Watson – guitar
Production
Jeff Pilson
Tracklist
1. Night Life
2. Woman In Black
3. Urgent
4. Waiting For A Girl Like You
5. Break It Up
6. Girl On The Moon
7. Say You Will
8. Feels Like The First Time
9. Cold As Ice
10. Hot Blooded
11. I Want To Know What Love Is
12. Juke Box Hero
