Waiting For The Sun, in a way, would be an easy candidate for being lumped in with The Soft Parade as the Doors’ weaker middle period between their impressive 1967 and their rawer last act. It received mixed reactions back in the ’60s, and its lingering reputation seems to be as a loose collection of songs more so than a record. That isn’t too far off: Waiting For The Sun has no unifying sound or mood in the way that Strange Days or Morrison Hotel do. It leaps between different emotions and styles radically between tracks, from the straight-up ’60s pop of “Hello, I Love You” to flamenco guitar on “Spanish Caravan” to snarling apocalyptic rock on “Not To Touch The Earth” and “Five To One,” to whatever it is “My Wild Love” is. But just look at the songs on this thing. Aside from “Hello, I Love You” being one of the most perfect singles of the ’60s, you have a whole set of high watermarks from the Doors’ career, like the twisted psychedelia of “The Unknown Soldier” to the aforementioned “Five To One,” the best song the band ever recorded. While the Doors rhythm section often excelled at incorporating jazzy flourishes into pop music, there’s something way more impactful in them tightening it up like this: the groove of “Five To One” is menacing, badass, immortal. Sure, listening to it as an album is sort of a whiplash experience, but that’s part of what makes it great in its way. This is the Doors at their strangest, their most exploratory, their most stylistically expansive. Waiting For The Sun has examples of everything the Doors did well, and it has them doing it at, occasionally, their highest level.