UNCUT MAGAZINE    November 2000

 review of Doors catalog

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 The Doors *****

 Strange Days ***

 Waiting For The Sun ****

 The Soft Parade ***

 Morrison Hotel ***

 LA Woman *****

 Essential Rarities ***

The Lizard King's life's work digitally remastered and packaged as vinyl replicas

The Doors still don't fit anyone else's picture, sticking uncomfortably in the gullet of the Sixties and every decade that's tried to revive them.

Maybe only Arthur Lee's Love, who they directly replaced as LA's premier band, could have equaled Jim Morrison's sunlit nightmare California, its hard-edged sexual utopia and death-stalked underbelly, played by musicians of astonishing pop resource;  but Lee didn't last, so here are The Doors, to open again.

The Rarities disc (from 1997's box-set) is of interest, showcasing lush MOR on "Who Scared You?", and Morrison's vocally challenged stab at Seventies Elvis Vegas Soul Man on "I Will Never Be Untrue".

But the band's broad musical remit is equally apparent on the 1967 debut The Doors, the sunny Sixties pop of "I Looked At You" and the Mod snap of "Twentieth Century Fox", indicating the discipline holding the painstakingly constructed abandon of "Light My Fire" and "The End" in place right up to the latter's disoriented finale.

Strange Days (1967) now sounds a low-key follow-up, the hard hammer of "Love Me Two Times" countered by adrift psychedelia and naively chucked-in sonic effects.

Waiting For The Sun (1968), their commercial peak, is more confident, clipped hit "Hello I Love You" contrasting with Love-style psychedelic baroque ("Spanish Caravan") and the pastoral "Yes, The River Knows", among their most artfully beautiful songs.

1969's widely derided LA-Philharmonic-and-jazz-muso-abetted The Soft Parade still sounds a gaudy aberration, and none the worse for it, Robbie Krieger (their unsung hit-maker) seizing the reins from a deteriorating Morrison to write a slickly uplifting pop sequence which the aghast singer could only arrest with the title track's equally manic attempt at encapsulating the straight, suburban LA they elsewhere seemed so distant from.

Morrison Hotel came in 1970, its listlessly extended riffs and too-literal embracing of always-present blues roots are suggestive of the Led Zep-ruled world they'd survived the Sixties to uncertainly compete in.  But LA Woman (1971) proved their undimmed force, at its finest on "Riders On The Storm", the voice Morrison would kill just before (however "accidentally") himself refined to a throat-ripped growl, as hissing rain-patter ambience conjures the shivering sexual thrill of imagining a psychopath close.

 There aren't many rock bodies of work as worth owning as this, not many bands who discomforted, provoked and played with such committed resource, right to the finish.

Nick Hasted

 

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