Foreigner – All Access Tonight: Live In Concert
Picture: C+
Sound: B- Extras: D Program: C+
Whatever happened to Foreigner? No one hears from them much.
They do not cut albums anymore.
No one ever picks them as an influence.
No one seems to sample them.
Their music hardly ever shows up on TV shows or in films, though one
song was in a burger commercial. Yet,
they are never sited as corporate rock much, but Rock purists felt they were
too Pop oriented for their own good and that their hits were competent at best,
if not outright awful.
For their 25th Anniversary, they issued the All
Access Tonight concert form their 1995 tour and Eagle Rock is issuing it
for the first time outside of their website.
It features the following performances:
1) Double
Vision
2) Cold As
Ice
3) Head
Games
4) Fool For
You Anytime
5) That Was
Yesterday
6) Dirty
White Boy
7) Feels
Like The First Time
8) Urgent
9) Juke Box
Hero
10) Hot Blooded
It would be at least fair to say that their hits became
Rock clichés and though never as loaded with them as Bon Jovi’s disasters, were
at least amusing and many are now gone with the death of Classic Rock in the
early 1990s. It is funny that something
that was so hot in its time is so invisible now and Lou Gramm’s solo outing
with songs like Midnight Blue did not help the band hold its audience
any. Even those who hate the band have
to deal with the songs as oldies from hell that qualify for the “gloriously
annoying” category.
The problem here is that the performances are awful and
muddy. Gramm has lost his range and
seems to be often struggling to sing the songs that come so naturally to
him. It is actually painful to see this
and inserting tour footage between each number actually increases the pain of
watching them tour as well. The money
is obviously good, but when it’s over, its over. Oh well.
The full frame videotaped, color image shows its age with
detail limits. The tour footage is the
usual hand-held amateur style, while the concert footage is nothing too
impressive and the camera may be too close to them. The sound is available in a weak Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix
with no real surrounds of any kind, then 5.1 Dolby & DTS, but even the DTS
(slightly better than the Dolby 5.1) is nothing great. The sound is restrictive and limited. This was obviously not thought out as a
multi-channel mix and it shows. Add the
muddy performances and the disc is a big disappointment. That includes the only bonus, a later 2002
performance of I Want To Know What Love Is, a song many feel they do not
have the innocent sound to do any more.
Gramm sounds about the same. It
does not help that Shirley Bassey, the legendary Welsh vocalist with three
great James Bond theme songs, has been doing a grand cover of it in all her
recent concerts. If you really like the
band, you can risk checking this 25th Anniversary DVD out or try the
DVD-Audio of their debut album Warner Brothers issued a few years ago.
- Nicholas Sheffo
