with that Gothic pseudopassion so popular now among fans of Kansas, Styx, Meat Loaf et al.

Foreigner combines this approach with another, one that apparently taps a dark, neurotic need in the American rock psyche: the unslakable thirst for a loud, simplistic, English boogie band. Here the group continues a lineage that can be traced from Ten Years After through early Led Zeppelin to Bad Company, bands whose drone and thump was or is interrupted only by purple phrases and absurd metaphor mongering. Lots of groups have provided serviceable rock & roll from such a formula, but none of them was silly or prideful enough to allow the imagery and metaphors to dominate the music. Yet this is exactly what Foreigner has done on its new record.

The most obvious result is that Double Vision consists largely of ponderous ballads. Lead singer Lou Gramm, who on the first LP scraped away at a passable Paul Rodgers impersonation, now whips out the fine sandpaper for a husky Paul McCartney echo on "You're All I Am" and "I Have Waited So Long," typical exercises in solipsism. When the melodies are more melodramatic, as on "Double Vision" and "Spellbinder," Gramm's histrionic head tones threaten to capsize his sinuses as he moans about the suffering he must bear at the hands of wretched women.

As befits a bunch who, among them, have labored in over sixteen professional bands, Foreigner's collective persona is that of the Great Trod Upon, the nice guy who takes shit from women in heroic amounts. That's what the first album's hit, "Cold as Ice," was about, and Double Vision inundates us with the same rather pathetic theme. Lead guitarist Mick Jones, long since extracted from Spooky Tooth, has written or cowritten every song but one here (the best one, by the way), and his self-pity knows no limit: he's bursting with romantic agony. At least that's what the title metaphor seems to be getting at–all the pent-up frustration and rage felt by the narrator has found its pernicious outlet in a sort of ocular apoplexy. The rest of Jones' complaint is just incomprehensible: "No disguise/For that double vision...My double vision is the best of me." Huh?

Jones is also capable of quite a nasty vindictiveness on "Back Where You Belong," in which the feebleness of the melody fails to imbue his railing with the redeeming force of a catharsis: "You treat me like a fool.../I'm gonna send