Sometimes, my wife says it best. About eight minutes into the side-long Foreigner suite, she remarked, “Well, in terms of hit or miss, this is definitely a miss.” I asked her what she meant, and she gave me a number of answers, along the lines of, “it’s cheesy” and “it sounds like the music for some Sims Medieval video game.” She went on to remark, “it makes me want to listen to Flight of the Conchords, because they do stuff like this as a joke.”
And that about gets it right, and the rest of the record doesn’t get much better. Stevens howls and strains his words, backed by a horn section, or pounding piano, or synthesizer solo. There are some moments of familiarity and warmth (like the final movement of Foreigner, which Coldplay was needlessly sued for plagiarism concerning the song Viva la Vida), but the bulk of the record is best described as “white soul,” resulting in a record that’s a far cry from the hushed folk that most people still mean when they say they like Cat Stevens.
According to Wikipedia, Stevens realized that the music he loved when he was young was mostly “black music,” and while one of the most emotive and intimate folk singer-songwriters of his era is certainly allowed to have an appreciation for funk and soul, there’s a big difference between being influenced by something and emulating it. While his earlier records were aided by Stevens’ vocal prowess, Foreigner is carried by it. Make no mistake, Cat Stevens can definitely carry a record on the strength of his voice, but paired with a much more ambitious production style, it loses the intimacy and tenderness of his folk material. This isn’t to say that folk artists aren’t allowed to abandon the formula of folk music (I’d be a huge hypocrite), but if you’re going to lose the intimacy that made you so attractive in the first place, you’d better replace it with something just as compelling. And on Foreigner, Cat Stevens fails to do so.