The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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It's hard not to look at the 2006 box set Perception without a skeptical eye, since it is not only the third box set of the Doors studio recordings to be released within the course of a decade, it is the second in a row to purport to house the "complete studio recordings" of a group that released six studio albums – and this doesn't count the live sets and hits comps that have appeared during that decade, either. Needless to say, the band has been packaged, repackaged, and reissued more than most, but just because there has been more Doors boxes than necessary doesn't mean that Perception lacks value. Indeed, it trumps the 1999 box The Complete Studio Recordings in every sense, since it covers the same territory in a set that is better packaged and better-sounding while also offering many more rarities. It also offers brand-new remasters supervised by the surviving band and their original producer Bruce Botnick, highlighted by the first-ever release of the classic debut album at its proper speed; apart from that, the improvements are by and large marginal in terms of the CD audio, but there are also 5.1 surround mixes of each of the albums on the DVD-Audios that accompany each album in this set, which are the primary sonic enticements to those who have already purchased these albums two, three, four times on CD. The bonus material – and each of the albums have bonus tracks, ranging from two cuts on L.A. Woman to ten on Morrison Hotel – by and large presents songs that have been official releases before (including much of the music from the Essential Rarities disc that was included in the 1999 box), but there have been a handful of rarities excavated for this set, including the unheard "Push Push" which has been added to The Soft Parade. All this makes Perception into what the 1999 box promised to be in its title: the complete recorded works, more or less, and it's better-looking and better-sounding, too. Even so, any fan who has purchased the prior sets would be forgiven if they passed on this otherwise excellent box: no matter how well-done it is, it's hard not to shake the perception that you've bought this all before.

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Allmusic.com

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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A tremendous debut album, and indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a knock-out punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose. "Light My Fire" was the cut that topped the charts and established the group as stars, but most of the rest of the album is just as impressive, including some of their best songs: the propulsive "Break on Through" (their first single), the beguiling Oriental mystery of "The Crystal Ship," the mysterious "End of the Night," "Take It as It Comes" (one of several tunes besides "Light My Fire" that also had hit potential), and the stomping rock of "Soul Kitchen" and "Twentieth Century Fox." The 11-minute Oedipal drama "The End" was the group at its most daring and, some would contend, overambitious. It was nonetheless a haunting cap to an album whose nonstop melodicism and dynamic tension would never be equaled by the group again, let alone bettered.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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Many of the songs on Strange Days had been written around the same time as the ones that appeared on The Doors, and with hindsight one has the sense that the best of the batch had already been cherry picked for the debut album. For that reason, the band's second effort isn't as consistently stunning as their debut, though overall it's a very successful continuation of the themes of their classic album. Besides the hit "Strange Days," highlights included the funky "Moonlight Drive," the eerie "You're Lost Little Girl," and the jerkily rhythmic "Love Me Two Times," which gave the band a small chart single. "My Eyes Have Seen You" and "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind" are minor but pleasing entries in the group's repertoire that share a subdued Eastern psychedelic air. The 11-minute "When the Music's Over" would often be featured as a live showstopper, yet it also illustrated their tendency to occasionally slip into drawn-out bombast.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The Doors' 1967 albums had raised expectations so high that their third effort was greeted as a major disappointment. With a few exceptions, the material was much mellower, and while this yielded some fine melodic ballad rock in "Love Street," "Wintertime Love," "Summer's Almost Gone," and "Yes, the River Knows," there was no denying that the songwriting was not as impressive as it had been on the first two records. On the other hand, there were first-rate tunes such as the spooky "The Unknown Soldier," with antiwar lyrics as uncompromisingly forceful as anything the band did, and the compulsively riff-driven "Hello, I Love You," which nonetheless bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night." The flamenco guitar of "Spanish Caravan," the all-out weirdness of "Not to Touch the Earth" (which was a snippet of a legendary abandoned opus, "The Celebration of the Lizard"), and the menacing closer "Five to One" were also interesting. In fact, time's been fairly kind to the record, which is quite enjoyable and diverse, just not as powerful a full-length statement as the group's best albums.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The weakest studio album recorded with Jim Morrison in the group, partially because their experiments with brass and strings on about half the tracks weren't entirely successful. More to the point, though, this was their weakest set of material, low lights including filler like "Do It" and "Runnin' Blue," a strange bluegrass-soul blend that was a small hit. On the other hand, about half the record is quite good, especially the huge hit "Touch Me" (their most successful integration of orchestration), the vicious hard rock riffs of "Wild Child," the overlooked "Shaman's Blues," and the lengthy title track, a multi-part suite that was one of the band's best attempts to mix rock with poetry. "Tell All the People" and "Wishful Sinful," both penned by Robbie Krieger, were uncharacteristically wistful tunes that became small hits but were not all that good, and not sung very convincingly by Morrison.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The Doors returned to crunching, straightforward hard rock on Morrison Hotel, an album that, despite yielding no major hit singles, returned them to critical favor with hip listeners. An increasingly bluesy flavor began to color the songwriting and arrangements, especially on the party'n'booze anthem "Roadhouse Blues." Airy mysticism was still present on "Waiting for the Sun," "Queen of the Highway," and "Indian Summer"; "Ship of Fools" and "Land Ho!" struck effective balances between the hard rock arrangements and the narrative reach of the lyrics. "Peace Frog" was the most political and controversial track, documenting the domestic unrest of late-'60s America before unexpectedly segueing into the restful ballad "Blue Sunday." "The Spy," by contrast, was a slow blues that pointed to the direction that would fully blossom on L.A. Woman.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The final album with Jim Morrison in the lineup is by far their most blues-oriented, and the singer's poetic ardor is undiminished, though his voice sounds increasingly worn and craggy on some numbers. Actually, some of the straight blues items sound kind of turgid, but that's more than made up for by several cuts that rate among their finest and most disturbing work. The seven-minute title track was a car-cruising classic that celebrated both the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles; the other long cut, the brooding, jazzy "Riders on the Storm," was the group at its most melodic and ominous. It and the far bouncier "Love Her Madly" were hit singles, and "The Changeling" and "L'America" count as some of their better little-heeded album tracks. An uneven but worthy finale from the original quartet.

Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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The Doors - Perception Box Set (2006) 6 CDs

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