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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely rules, June 9, 2008
Weird, dark, catchy, and cool as hell. See, while I do have a bit of a "Doors are overrated" thing going on, I do pretty much love this album, with the lone exception of the awful poetry recitation "Horse Latitudes". Basically, this takes the vision of the debut to the extreme. Nothing light. No polka. Some cabaret, but no polka. "Moonlight Drive", the title track, "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind" and "You're Lost Little Girl" are the highlights of the whole "dark pop" vibe this album has going on - weird, trippy lyrics, haunting slide guitars, and irresistible melodies. These songs do not leave your head. The marimba part on "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind" is sweet, too. Of course, there's not just dark pop, there's also dark blues-rock. Who can resist, for instance, the big hit "Love Me Two Times"? Great riff, a random harpsichord part that has no place in a blues song but sounds amazing nonetheless, and Jim Morrison's charisma carrying the song. You want more of that? How about "My Eyes Have Seen You"? Build the tension, build it, build it, build it... RELEASE! And what about the cabaret? I'll tell you what about the cabaret. On "People Are Strange", Ray Manzarek pulls every bizarre, kitschy keyboard he's got out of storage and eats acid with Jim. Both of them freak out, and the result is one of the Doors' best singles. It might even be better than "Love Me Two Times"! But neither of them beat "When the Music's Over", my pick for the Doors' best extended piece. It's got a kinetic, almost acid-jazz groove, with chaotic fuzzy guitars, and enough vocal prowess to keep you listening. Cool lyrics, too! There's even a bass in there. And crazy drumming. This might be the Doors' best album, and it's certainly their definitive one.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly emotive, richly mysterious, melodically astounding, March 18, 2003
The Doors broke new ground once again, this time releasing a collection of songs some may feel is uneven; but this one pays great dividends the more you listen to it; myself I only half-listened for years, but just recently, finally put forth the effort. Though initially not all the tunes seemed melodically accessible - after I invested a bit more time and sensibility, the dividends started to accrue in a dramatically meaningful fashion. The way the engineer manages to allow all the instruments and the vocals to be heard and still maintain the Doors' signature murky sound is amazing. But it would be nothing if the musicians didn't allow every part/moment to dovetail together. Robby Krieger brilliantly re-invents the guitar (tonally, melodically, and harmonically) on every song, as well as on every instrumental break of "When the Music's Over", the long song/poem which closes out album. Ray Manzarek counters with mostly organ, but at times barroom piano or harpsichord. From him, also, you don't hear the same kinds of riffs or the same sound palette from song to song. And at times, each will be heard overdubbing a part with a different tonal setting, melody and rhythm, panned to the opposite side of the stereo field. So you'll have two organs, or else two guitars riffing off of each other, while Morrison's vocal pleads/saddens/exults/growls/hovers/screams somewhere in between. On the cover is a blue-tinted photograph of all these animated circus performers (somewhat reminiscent of Picasso's more quiescent painting of the "Family of Saltimbaques" from his Rose Period - the record is indeed the quintessential dark metaphysical/emotional/visceral circus. 'Sergeant Pepper' and 'The United States of America' may have started the carnival ball rolling . . . 'Strange Days' and [Procol Harum's] 'Shine On Brightly' rolled the big sonic circus ball underground, undersea, into heaven and hell and all points between. [The song ] "Strange Days" is the perfect beginning for what's to come [like a giant violet-and-gold-hued moth emerging from its chrysalis in the dead of night]. Ray Manzarek switches drawbars on his Hammond B-3 organ every four beats of the repeating ostinado introduction, creating a luscious viscerally appealing four-bar lead in. The three instrumentalists working in tandem generate an unbelievably inventive melodic/harmonic sound space. Morrison, when he reprises a verse does it differently each time, with intensely emoted melodic inversions, submersions, etc. His voice is fed through an electronic delay box (emerging ~½ beat late) and through some sort of weird combo algorithm of distortion/reverb/tremelo, then panned slightly left of his real vocal sound, the whole which further augments the already disjointed, mysterious atmosphere. The bassist has the main melody during instrumental breaks - the organ plays chord changes over his expressive (almost meandering) ostinado pattern. Even the drums are melodically impressionistic, in addition to providing the usual function of sonic timekeeping. Every song has something very different to say, both musically and lyrically. And the message, the poetry is, to my mind, moving and profound. Listen to the meaning of the words with your heart - your mind and possibly your life will never be the same. When Jim is singing about something that enrages him, the emotion is obvious; and when he sings about something that is sad or saddening to him, you hear the empathy in his voice. This is no detached, lightweight ego-tripper. The Doors are totally involved, totally committed to their muse(s), and it implodes/explodes/seeps into you with every beat and every phrase. "We want the world . . . and we want it . . . NOW!!!!!"...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange days have found us, November 11, 2005
Strange days have found us
Together with the first one, this second album of the Doors shows the band in it's most wellknown period and sound. You can call it the basic Doors. When Morrison sings in Strange Days: `we shall go on playing or find a new town', I always think of Paris were I've seen his grave on Père La Chaise. The playing had stopped; he found a new town were his playing stopped definitively... (When you're on the graveyard his grave isn't hard to find. You just follow the marks other Doors-fans left to show you the way.)
Strange days is one of my favourite Doors-songs because of the way the strangeness of life in a great combination of music and lyrics is brought to us. Especialy when the song is played we have to agree: this certainly is the strangest life we've ever known. The album has more moments with that nice touch of melancholic filosophy.
There are some down to earth songs on the record too: You're Lost Little Girl and Unhappy Girl are typical Doors-songs about love/women with a little twist. Love Me Two Times is a nice little blues with the small touch of male-ignorance a good blues should always have: `one for tomorrow and one just for today'. Moonlight Drive is maybe not as striking as some other Doors-material, but it has a very consequent metafore in it. (Lesser Gods on the poetic stage tend to forget what metafore they using halfway their lyrics.) As a not native speaker I liked to sing along with the `going down'-part at the end of the song with a low voice, without thinking about what it meant. Well, let's put it like this: when they've managed to swim to the moon and climb to the sky, they have to come down again. Morrison was a decent man.
Horse Latitudes is more poetry and free-`jazz' than rock. The contrast of down-to-earth (blues) material and the `stranger' music that is typical for all Doors-albums is very much present on this album. Horse Latitudes is placed between the two earlier mentioned blues songs.
The almost simplesounding song People Are Strange has the same contrast. The music is very happy but when you take the lyrics seriously there's nothing happy about this song. It's wellknown:
`people are strange, when you're a stranger
faces look ugly when you're alone
women seem wicked when you're unwanted
streets are uneven when you're down'
You should compare the lyrics to L'America of the album L.A. Woman (see my review).
`friendly strangers came to town
all the people put them down
but the women love their ways
come again some other day'
At least the women started to like the unwanted.
The two lovesongs that follow have the same theme but they contradict eachother in a way. I'm talking about My Eyes Have Seen You and I Can't See Your Face In My Mind. The lyrics are still allright considering the fact that they're just two lovesongs.
But then something happens. Manzarek digs deep inside his organ and there it is: When The Music's Over. Another song of great theatrical suspence and terribly good lyrics. Songs like this had never been done before, exept by the Doors themselves in The End. The tension in this song reaches it's highest point when the music dies out and we `hear a very geantle sound'...'we want the world and we want it...'
Since I know songs like this exist, I've been looking for them. There's not much around. I found one band that can play the same trick on me as The Doors did when I was about 15 years old. There an instrumtal band tough. A jazzband from Scandinavia, called the Esbjorn Svensson Trio. See them live and find out what I mean. They're coming to America soon. Great pianojazz with large themes and mystical enchanting rythms and compositions with heavy parts and still parts, freaky things and clean things, sweeping you off your feet.
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