All things considered, Strange Days is The Doors' best album, despite the fact that it never sold as well as their first. And maybe, here at last, we have a clue to Morrison. Certainly this LP, revolving around one concept, from brilliant music to brilliant cover, is the Doors most cohesive effort (Waiting for the Sun, for instance, their third LP, contains excellent songs, but they don't fit together. There's no motion from one to another, no continuity, as if tracks that had to be left off other albums for one reason or another, had accumulated here), and certainly at least two years ahead of its time. If it were to be released now, it would be hailed as a masterpiece. Listening to Strange Days is like watching Fellini's Satyricon. Morrison's words are so cinematic that each song begins to form pictures in the mind. More than any other American songwriter - lyricist, if you will - he has this quality. Like the film, Strange Days builds its storyline (of people trying desperately to reach each other through the choking haze of drugs and artificial masks) through the images and characters in a series of vignettes. And the whole becomes more and more visible the deeper one gets into the film and/or the album. Because Strange Days has been set up that way. Copyright 2003 by Eric Van Lustbader/Waiting-forthe-Sun.net