Cigarettes After Sex takes The Doors’ 1967 psychedelic rock classic and does something strange with it. They don’t so much cover it as they let it decay beautifully.
Where Jim Morrison delivered theatrical intensity and rock mysticism, Greg Gonzalez and company strip everything down until there’s almost nothing left but the skeleton of the song, bare and exposed.
The difference hits you immediately. The original moves with a certain urgency, even in its mellower moments.
This version crawls. Gonzalez’s androgynous vocals drift above the sparsest instrumentation: a few guitar notes here, some barely-there bass, percussion that sounds like it’s afraid to fully commit. That minimalism isn’t a weakness, though. It’s the entire point.
Everything sounds like it’s been submerged underwater, then pulled back up and left to dry in dim light.
The production wraps each element in this hazy film, creating distance even as the performance feels uncomfortably close.
You can hear the space between notes, the quiet settling after each phrase. They’re not rushing to fill silence because the silence matters as much as what gets played.
What makes this work is how they completely ignore what made The Doors’ version powerful. They’re not trying to channel Morrison’s dramatic flair or recreate that distinctive organ sound.
They take the lyrics about kisses and gentle rain and freedom, and deliver them with this resigned tenderness that’s almost defeated.
“Before you slip into unconsciousness / I’d like to have another kiss” stops being a passionate plea.
It’s more like someone acknowledging that whatever’s happening is already over, we’re just watching it end in slow motion.
The dreamy atmosphere people talk about with this band goes into overdrive here. Time stretches out.
When the vocals drop out and it’s just instruments, it feels longer than it actually is. They pack so much reverb and echo in there that notes hang in the air like they’re stuck.
By the time Gonzalez reaches “The crystal ship is being filled,” you’re so submerged in the mood that the words take on different weight.
It stops being Morrison’s psychedelic metaphor and becomes that feeling of watching time slip away while you can’t do anything to stop it.
Listening to this cover feels like standing at the edge of a memory that’s about to tip over. It’s not really a tribute, not an imitation either.
More like hearing a ghost of the original song, but all the color has been drained out of it. Where The Doors made you want to experience everything intensely, this version makes you want to sit still and just feel the ache.
The melancholy becomes something you want to hold onto, which sounds contradictory but that’s how it works. Sometimes you need to drown in your own thoughts to make sense of anything.
The track doesn’t try to prove anything or compete with what came before. It exists in its own sad, beautiful space, and once you’re in it, getting back out takes effort. Most people probably won’t bother trying.
You might also like:
- Lana Del Rey’s Young and Beautiful: meaning, scene, legacy
-
Joji’s Digital Discharge: The Gritty Rebirth of “PIXELATED KISSES”
-
Royel Otis Drop Who’s Your Boyfriend: What It’s Really About
-
Ethel Cain’s Fuck Me Eyes: A Shimmering Character Study of Longing, Scorn and Small-Town Myth
-
“One Of The Greats” — Review & Meaning by Florence + The Machine