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The Doors - An American Prayer CD (album) cover

AN AMERICAN PRAYER

The Doors

 

Proto-Prog

3.15 | 154 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

clarke2001
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars This album is a posthumous collection of Jim Morrison's works while the rest of the band contributed in musical background. It was released in 1978 and it considered as THE DOORS' swan song.

It's arguable how much the music of THE DOORS is of interest for a progressive rock purist. In the case of this album, music is more in background than in foreground - for obvious reasons. However, there are a few notable exceptions, and they are quite good.

This is a nice example of possible evolving of the band and its sound if they had succeeded to last longer: the music is distanced from the late sixties West Coast-psychedelia (there are few psych parts though) and moved towards more modern sound (for 1978), blending rock with latino-american music ("Black Polished Chrome/Latino Chrome"), classical (more about it later), even a traces of disco could be found. Sound and production are top-notch, especially considering the fact that band was using recorder tapes of Jim's poetry from 1970.

Manzarek replaced his Vox organ for a Hammond; synthesizers are present as well, there is no more Fender bass piano (there is a real bass guitar played by a session musician), and Krieger's guitar is not so psychedelic and fuzzed anymore, but it sounds nice and mature.

The emphasis of the album is Jim's poetry, and that is, really, what this album is all about. I wouldn't comment the poetry here, you can like it or not, but it fits with the music just fine (actually, vice versa is more accurate) and it's creating different, effective atmospheres through the whole length of the album. Certainly, this is an art piece; it's not supposed to be played in your CD player while you're washing the dishes or something. Still, the fans of prog rock will be somewhat disappointed, I guess. This is "progressive" music, but not "progressive rock" per se, and one must not take for granted all the facts written about the evolving music of the band and this album in particular; it should be compared and analysed from the different point of view so the listener could define the status, time and the place. Or you can rather abandon all the comparations and simply enjoy the music. My favourite is (how predictable) an adaptation of Albinoni's "Adaggio" (why it's spelled "Adagio"?). This is my definition of how and adaptation of classical piece should sound like in rock music - and it doesn't need to be symphonic prog and/or pompous. This song is bold, and so are Jim's beautiful and touchy lyrics. The same applies for the majority of the album. I am recommending this album to anyone; it's quite possible that you won't like it, but you should give it a try.

clarke2001 | 4/5 |

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