Hotel California Review

The Eagles spend this album arguing that the place which made them is rotting, which is a strange move for the biggest American band of the decade and the reason the record still has teeth. The title track is the famous one and earns it: six and a half minutes, a story that never explains itself, and a closing guitar duel between Don Felder and Joe Walsh that has been copied far more often than it has been equaled.

Life in the Fast Lane and New Kid in Town run the same theme through different rooms, and The Last Resort finishes by accusing the entire westward expansion of being a real estate scam. The playing and the engineering are immaculate. Bill Szymczyk gets a sound so clean that later critics used it as evidence against the album, and the case is not unreasonable, because the arrangements are so controlled that the contempt in the lyrics never quite reaches the music.

That is the split in the consensus. Nobody argues about the craft or about the three songs that matter, and plenty of serious writers find the whole thing bloodless next to what its authors claim to feel. Two tracks in the back half are filler by any measure. What survives is a sharp, beautifully made record about California with a much lower opinion of California than its audience ever noticed.