The Doors' back catalogue has undergone a well-deserved reappraisal in the last year or so. After last year's 'Complete Studio Recordings' box set, the individual albums are re-released in remastered form and complete with facsimile LP sleeves and inners.
'The Doors', the band's debut from 1967, is arguably their best full-length work - it's certainly their most cohesive. 'Break On Through' is a tumultuous opening, with Jim Morrison's magnificent voice booming over the frenzied playing of his comrades.
On this album, the band and Morrison are definite equals - both inspiring the other to new heights - unlike their later albums. Ray Manzarek's stabbing keyboard on 'Soul Kitchen' gives an edge to Morrison's tale of the city at night.
Covering Weill and Brecht's 'Alabama Song' could be dismissed as literary pretentiousness were it not carried it off with such aplomb. By contrast, Willie Dixon's downhome blues song 'Back Door Man' is a snarling, lascivious beast.
'Light My Fire', in its elongated form, still stands up to scrutiny after all this time. And there's the 'The End', a masterpiece of suspended tension, with Bobby Krieger's snaking guitar lines and John Densmore's booming drums, which sound like they've been recorded in a cave, dragging the song kicking and screaming to its apocalyptic finale.
A brooding, sweeping magnificence of an album.
by Simon P Ward