One-time AOR kings Foreigner’s trajectory after their chart-topping 1981 album 4 looks like a Winter Olympics downhill course: steep and treacherous.

First came the ’80s-production house of horrors that was 1984’s Agent Provocateur, complete with the songwriting controversy that wrecked the partnership between guitarist-bandleader Mick Jones and lead vocalist Lou Gramm. Next was 1987’s Inside Information, the last gasp from the lineup that made 4—also featuring Rick Wills (bass) and Dennis Elliott (drums)—and Gramm’s last with the band for eight years.

Inside Information is the sound of a group plowing headlong into a snowbank. Whatever remaining droplets of songwriting mojo Gramm and Jones had squeezed out on the mostly dull Agent Provocateur were gone by the time they entered the studio for this disc. Both men were distracted and disinterested; Gramm’s first solo album Ready Or Not had come out ten months before, with both his second solo disc and Jones’ lone solo outing to follow in 1989. As a result, Inside Information sounded like exactly what it was: an album’s worth of uninspired filler, with the added bonus of being dipped in subzero ’80s production.

The best pair from this bad lot arrive near the front. Opener “Heart Turns to Stone” features pumping guitar and bass in pitched battle with the frostiest synths this side of the Arctic Circle, as Gramm pleads with yet another evil woman who’s done him wrong (these guys have issues…!). Cash Box called this hooky yet formulaic single “corporate rock,” and they weren’t wrong. Best track and third single “Say You Will” is a melodic rocker with pulsing hooks and an insistent bass line; if the synths don’t give you frostbite, you might listen long enough to realize the lyric wouldn’t fill the back of a napkin.

It’s all downhill from there. Second single “I Don’t Want to Live Without You” is a paint-by-numbers ballad that could serve as the Wikipedia illustration for “The Law of Diminishing Returns.” Back in 1981, “Waiting For A Girl Like You” was interesting because it represented a change of pace from the group’s typical macho arena schlock. Its 1984 sequel “I Want To Know What Love Is” followed a similar template but, despite Gramm’s strong lead vocal, broke no new ground. The third edition of Yearning Power Ballad Demanded By Our Label finds the entire band sounding bored to tears; the fact this track hit #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart just illustrates how singles from established bands often perform based more on nostalgia than substance.

The rest of this album struggles to clear the bar of disposable filler; I can’t imagine a single one of the remaining tracks making the cut for one of the band’s early albums. “Can’t Wait” is slumbery synth-pop until it hits its overwrought chorus; “Counting Every Minute” is an utterly predictable thumper with an eyeroll-inducing lyric (“Come and get it while it’s hot”); and the title track is that Foreigner specialty, a song that’s urgent for no detectable reason, and ends up feeling like just another pose.

The last four cuts represent the dregs of the dregs. “The Beat Of My Heart” features a stylish Spanish guitar intro played by guest Hugh McCracken before erupting into an over-produced pile of Bluster Rock whose lyric makes “Juke Box Hero” feel like Shakespeare. “Face To Face” is a dreadful melange of frosty synths, gated drums and cheeseball lyrics. The one song in the history of the group to be credited to all of its members at the time, “Out Of The Blue” is a plodding mid-tempo snoozer whose moderately clever stutter-stepping riff isn’t enough to rescue it from generic AOR cheese. Closing rocker “A Night to Remember” achieves decent momentum before sinking under the weight of a deeply unfortunate lyric: “I want drums like thunder / Gimme guitars that scream / One woman who can rock me / Yeah, my little love machine.”

Can you say “egregious”? I knew you could.

Inside Information might have been—possibly should have been—the end of Foreigner. In the aftermath, Gramm and Jones both walked away to pursue solo careers. Four years later, Jones would reconvene the group behind new frontman Johnny Edwards for 1991’s Unusual Heat—which bombed worse than Inside Information. After travails like these, the fact that Foreigner was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame feels like a kind of miracle—the “I still can’t believe that actually happened” kind.

Rating: D

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