The Eagles - Hell Freezes Over
Release Date: 8 November 1994
Date I Got: 1 June 2005
Best Track: The Last Resort
Other Notable Tracks: Wasted Time, Hotel California
Growing up, I didn’t know to many adults that I would now consider music geeks. Those that came closest were my parents and a couple they were friends with. They all liked the Eagles, and I grew up listening to the two Greatest Hits sets.
I think I must have liked it well enough. But after I "got into" music I didn’t listen to much my parents did. I got a copy of this album because the opportunity arose and, being a Live album, might contain many of the songs I knew.
It does, but this isn’t really that great of a thing; this I’ll talk more about tomorrow. Quite succinctly, I can’t say I imagine a situation where I would want to listen to this album.
Even The Eagles’ indisputably best track Hotel California is empty here: the foreboding of the original instrumentation is replaced with a, I don’t know, something that sounds like The Beach Boy’s Kokomo. It may just be the congas. Still, the Latin-like groove here could work if it sounded like being held in a Mexican border jail where no one speaks English and the guards have big mustaches. But that stereotype isn’t the one in play here. Instead, this is more like your woman taking a second glance at another guy while lounging next to the hotel swimming pool. It’s still slightly unnerving, but mostly clean and harmless.
Those are the keywords for the entire album. Though I imagine some would claim that the Eagles’ are always like that (and they have somewhat of a point), it’s just bad here. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is just a cash grab, an artifact from a reunion tour commenced because the market would support three-digit tickets. But we know better, and they even say so at the beginning of Tequila Sunrise: "Just for the record, we never broke up, we just took a fourteen year vacation”
The exception here–because there always is one–is the version of The Last Resort, which is as good as the album version, if not a touch better. It’s the emotional highlight of the album: I’d like to think that the words become truer and sadder as one ages, and the two decades since its writing has made it more poignant. It’s the only point on the album that approaches any sort of pathos and any sort of earnestness.
Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic] [myspace]
[Video - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over)]
[Video - Tequila Sunrise (Hell Freesez Over)]
