WAITING FOR THE SUN

Everybody has their controversial opinions about a band's discography, this album sucks, this album's the best, and whatnot. With me, this is the best Doors album, almost, on some days it's L.A. Woman and on others it's this. But for the sake of this review Waiting For The Sun is my favorite.

The albums starts with Hello, I Love You. It's people like Morrison who can make these songs so weirdly amazing. Lines like "She's walking down the street, blind to every eye she meets, do you think you'll be the guy to make the queen of the angels sigh?" are so mystical and abstract. I don't quite get what it means (and if you say you do you're lying), but it still paints a weird picture in my head that fits everything else about this song perfectly.

Love Street continues this theme of love song with funky poetry, but I get this one even less. Still a great song. Fits perfectly in the album, it works great separating the poppy keyboard heavy sound of Hello, I Love You to the existential worrying of Not To Touch The Earth. I also just like the way he says "I see you live on Love Street, there's this store where the creatures meet."

Not To Touch The Earth is a very horrifying Halloweenish song, warning you of the mansion at the top of the hill, and finding JFK's corpse in some sort car that runs on "glue and tar". And then the song ends, you hear Jim heavily breathing, you figure that it's gonna fade out. Then you hear him starting to speak... "WHOA!!" Boom now the song's actually started. There's instruments in the back repeating this heavy jumping tone. The keyboard on one side making these unnatural noises and the guitar on the other doing the same thing while Morrison screams at you to run with him, as well as other obscene things. This is definitely one of The Doors' best.

Summer's Almost Gone is also haunting, but in a different way. Instead of knocking you to the floor and giving you a panic attack; it gives you a helping hand and wants away, with an annoying look in its eyes.

Wintertime Love brings it back to what the first two tracks were, it's a love song, great lyrics, but I like it better. Like the title implies, it's an extremely warm song, more than Hello, I Love You and Love Street. It takes you inside, gives you a warm blanket and fresh hot chocolate. It brings you back to health before throwing you out to the wolves again after less than two minutes.

The Unknown Solider is different wolf though, instead of making you imagine weird mansions and odd cars, it's a very real world song. Telling you about an unknown and unnamed solider, before playing the shot that killed him. The rest of the song is musically upbeat, dancing around the death of people who had no choice but to be there and die there, instead celebrating the end of this war regardless. Though the music still has an uneven quality to it, it knows what happened and it doesn't feel good about it.

As the first song on side two, Spanish Caravan brings you back around to imagining unusual scenes. Instead of horror, it's very adventurous. Talking about wanting to ride with a Spanish caravan. The switch of modes in the middle implies that our protagonist was taken by the caravan. The song speeds up and more electric instruments are added. This all paints a picture of an old caravan being dragged by horses speeding through hot unpopulated areas of Europe, while the protagonist is in the back writing about what he sees outside.

My Wild Love is a much softer song, talking about his "wild love" going around making enemies with the devil and such. This is definitely the least involved of all the songs here, but still enjoyable.

We Could Be So Good Together is very reminiscent of their first two albums. Almost sounds like's a Strange Days song that someone accidently put here. Very Doors lyrics, not as good a love song as this album's previous, but still a bop.

Yes, The River Know is another clam haunting track. To me it sounds like a very old and experienced man, on the verge of death, is relaying his life story to me in cryptic yet understandable terms, on a bench, near a river, in a park. He's using the river as sort of an analogy of the passing of life and the bringing a new. Each verse sounds like he remembers something, a regret, a love one he didn't spend enough time with, things he'll never be able to do. The song doesn't end in a bombastic way, it's sounds like I left the bench, said goodbye to the old man and went on my way/ Thinking and gaining things from the experience, looking at trees and dogs as I walk my way out of the park.

Five To One sounds like it starts where Yes, The River Knows left off. Having learned from whatever the old man said, and applying it to whatever sort of social change we're protesting for. This song is a slapper, if this isn't getting you to jump out of your seat and put a picket in your hand, than your listening to a completely different album.