The Doors‘ second album sees the band moving away from their blues rock roots into more psychedelic territory. Strange Days is The Doors’ most psychedelic album by a good margin, with plenty of layers and effects covering the album. It’s easy to see while a lot of fans don’t regard this album to be one of their best for being a departure from their roots, but truth be told I slightly prefer this to the debut. It helps that there are no covers this time around, so the record is more dominated by The Doors’ (and Morrison’s) distinct personality.

Sometimes the amount of studio wizardry hurts the songs, like on the title track where the mono mix is so thick that it buries the genuinely good tune that’s underneath all the psychedelic effects, making this the only Doors album where you might actually want to consider going for the stereo mix. That problem isn’t as bad with the rest of the songs, however. In fact the effects make the songs better more often than not due to the album being more dominated by slow ballads rather than rockers which become somewhat haunting when some echo and reverb are placed on them, such as my personal favorite, “You’re Lost Little Girl.”

The album closes with the jazzy 11-minute “When the Music’s Over,” an obvious contrived attempt to recreate the structure of “The End” without any genuine inspiration. Morrison spits out some poetry that amounts to little more than words with a nice combination of them every now and again while the band plays backing elevator music. Lacks any of the surprise and impact that “The End” had. Still, somewhat underrated when compared to its predecessor, though the band’s best album is still clearly Morrison Hotel.