Love them or hate them, there has never been another band quite like The Doors. A film school graduate stricken with stage fright for a lead singer, a jazz drummer, a classically trained pianist and a flamenco guitarist made for the unlikeliest of all rock n roll combos. After the tragic death of their lead singer, the trio of Krieger (guitar), John Densmore (drums) and Ray Manzarek (keyboards) bravely soldiered on for two more albums, Other Voices (1971) and Full Circle (1972) before calling it quits. Following the dissolution of The Doors, Densmore & Krieger formed Butts Band in 1973 and recorded two albums Butts Band (1974) and Hear And Now (1975) before going their separate ways. Since then Krieger has dabbled mostly, making just six records over a period of 35 years. The Ritual Begins At Sundown is his first new album in a decade.
Essentially a jazz record, The Ritual Begins At Sundown is full to the brim of horns, horns and more horns with Krieger’s trademark slide rising above the cacophony of righteous grooves. Birthed somewhere between Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and Weather Report’s Heavy Weather, The Ritual Begins At Sundown can trace it’s earliest beginnings to The Doors’ 1969 album The Soft Parade. Krieger wrote the majority of the songs for that album and brought in the unlikely horn section that helped produce the hit single “Touch Me” as well as the album opener “Tell All The People”.
In addition to all those horns an eerily dissonant keyboard can be heard ghosting its way through most of the album bringing to mind Ray Manzarek’s work on The Doors’ An American Prayer album, the band’s 1978 reunion of sorts. As suggested by the band’s late singer almost a decade earlier the trio finally got ’round to recording new music tracks in support of Jim Morrison’s spoken word poetry for their second final outing together.
Their final album would not materialize for another 22 years in the form of Stoned Immaculate (2000) where the trio play on their own tribute album with an assortment of lead vocalists from William S. Burroughs to Scott Weiland and Ian Astbury sitting in for Morrison, covering Doors songs.
With all three of these elements converging together one might say The Ritual Begins At Sundown could very well be the sound of The Doors in 2020, one only has to imagine Morrison crooning over these swinging jazz lines. Contrary to the sound of the new record are the exceptionally prominent bass lines which were virtually unheard of on the Doors albums of the 60’s. A fine addition to The Door’s canon, The Ritual Begins At Sundown is the joyful sound of Robby Krieger at play, a sound all too rarely heard in the last 50 odd years. Enjoy.
8.5/10
2020 Song Of The Day Club
Bi-Weekly Record Review 19/26