This is an amusement park ride... all over the place.

My initial thought when my dad said that Foreigner was a great band when he was a kid was, “Oh gosh this is either going to suck or it’s going to suck.” The cover grips your eyes as you see all of the guys in the band, SIX, all of them with colorful overcoats, and long hair. “This will be interesting.”
I started listening to their first album named after the band, Foreigner, by Foreigner. It instantly caught my attention with the great song “Feels Like the First Time”. It’s a jumpy song starting with a nice soft guitar solo and drum beat. It’s easy to relate the lead singer, Lou Gramm, to the band INXS and Queen.
I love the first two songs, “Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold as Ice”, for their lyrics, and instrumentals, but when it ended, and “Starrider” started, a totally different vibe was created in my mind.
It is a calmer song, mellow guitar, rising and falling lyric tones, and a sort of rainy day kind of feeling. I think Foreigner did this on purpose to put a break in the more up tempo songs, but I don’t like the place they put it in.

“Headknocker” plays after, and brings the listener back. It’s not one of my favorite songs in this album, actually I like “Starrider” more because of the care free, slow sensation presented with it.
“The Damage is Done” is a song you might find in the middle of an old movie when the main character just screws up with his girlfriend, and he walks away in the rain with his head under his hood. That is the message the song offers from the slow drum beat pounding in the back and the sad sounding lyrics.
“Long, Long Way From Home”... Wow this song is really good. Everything in this song is right, the saxaphone in the background, the tone of voice, and the solos. It all fits perfectly. When it was over, I was disappointed to hear the start of another slow song,
“Woman, oh Woman”. The only good slow songs are the ones that have good lyrics, and I don’t believe Foreigner got that element in this song. Overall it is a good message, but presentation didn’t follow up.
Thank goodness, “At War With the World” fixed the mood. “I’m at war with the world, that’s the way it must be.” Those words are some of the best I’ve heard in a song. This is one of my favorite songs in this album.
This is the example of a calm song with great lyrics, “Fool for you anyway”. It is the perfect combination of melancholy and happy-anyway attitudes, back and forth the whole ride through.
The last song in this rollercoaster album is “I Need You” which builds up slow and gets into a can do, bang bang attitude. It is a great finale shoving a love song into the face of the listener who was expecting a heavy, chill song. Smoothe way to top it off.
Foreigner’s first album is pretty good, of course there are a few songs that I don’t like. I would give it 3.5 stars for the songs, that I did like, but the positioning of the songs could totally change the effect given for the better. I am glad that I was introduced to this group, they are definitely on the top 40 favorite artists in my mind.