WAITING FOR THE SUN

Waiting for the Sun is the third album from California psychadelic dark rock band The Doors. Their first two albums are psychadelic rock classics and I regard the second album Strange Days among my alltime favorite albums. Waiting for the Sun continues the style from the previous albums but is generally not as dark.

The music is still driven by Ray Manzarek´s circus music like organ playing and Jim Morrison´s dark and pleasant vocals but Robby Krieger´s innovative guitar lines and John Densmore´s at times jazzy drumming is also a big part of The Doors sound. As usual The Doors use session bassists. This time it´s Doug Lubahn, Kerry Magness and Leroy Vinnegar.

We get some nice pop/ rock songs here in Hello, I Love you, Love Street and We Could Be so Good Toghether. A blues song in Five to One. A few soft pop/ rock songs in Wintertime Love and Yes The River Knows and the three highlights of the album Unknown Soldier, the beuatiful Spanish Caravan ( one of my favorite Doors tunes) and the psychadelic and strange extract from the 20 minute + epic The Celebration of the Lizard. Too bad they didn´t include the whole song but in those LP days there was a limited playing time available.

The musicianship is excellent and even though Waiting for the Sun has the most muddy production of the three first albums the sound is still good.

Waiting for the Sun is not my favorite Doors album but it´s definitely worth 4 small stars. I can see that many have critizised that The Doors had aimed at a more commercial sound with this one but despite the generally lighter mood on Waiting for the Sun I don´t think it´s too commercial. A great album IMO, but if you´re new to The Doors I would recommend that you start with the first two albums before listening to this one.

This would be their last psychadelic tinged album as they would experiment with a new sound on the next album called The Soft Parade.