The first two Doors albums are virtually twins, both bookending 1967 and comprising the original body of material written and performed by the band up to and around that time. While the first album is an undisputed classic of rock, Strange Days, its little brother, isn't too shabby.
In some ways the two albums work off of each other, sort of like a split double album, but Strange Days clearly got stuck with the weaker material. In any song-to-song matchups it's material falls a little short of the debut. Some of the songs, most notably "Moonlight Drive" pre-date the first album in origin, though the recordings here are not archival. In fact, Strange Days enjoys a small production edge over The Doors with broader instrumentation (a Moog was used on the title track for instance), and the bass, courtesy of Doug Lubahn, is meaty and surprisingly intricate for a band that never had a full-time member in that role. The previous album relied on uncredited performers and Ray Manzarek's left hand for the lower registers, so this was a big step up.
This album closed the book on the band's early period. The next album, the troubled Waiting for the Sun, would show a new and slightly less confident band as they began to craft new material to sustain future albums. Jim Morrison, in particular, would exhibit increasingly wild lyrics and vocal delivery, something that becomes very apparent when the early hit were done live in the later chapter of the band's history.
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