Let me tell you about Hell, my friends.

Hell is not a lake of fire. It is not ceaseless torture. No, Hell is a place where everyone is a musician, and everyone is good, and everyone is supportive of eachother. Everyone is always writing new songs and performing them for eachother, and everyone is dabbling in new genres and techniques, and everyone loves it.

But every song, despite how it starts, EVERY song turns into Hotel California, with that obnoxious, top-of-the-range, “welcome to the ‘otell Caaaaalifornia!”

Listening to it in full, the song itself seems to have been birthed in this version of Hell: a minor keyed chord progression with an interesting chromatic run and fantastic riffs (see: twin guitar triplet arpeggios in one of the instrumental sections) suddenly breaks into a hackneyed crescendo tailor-made for poorly executed karaoke renditions. It would be okay if the whole song were bad–but up until the chorus, the Eagles have proved that they can write interesting music. The chorus just proves that they’re shameless.

According to Wikipedia, this album has universal acclaim, finding itself on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums Ever (see: false authorities in music critique). But I can’t help but finding it wavering between boring, sentimental pastiche (Wasted Time) and testosterone fueled, meaningless riffing (Life in the Fast Lane). There’s some good stuff on the second side (Victim of Love, Try and Love Again), but by that time, I’ve already been so turned off by the first side’s singles to give the album as a whole any though, and The Last Resort comes along with its one boring chord progression and over-wrought hippy sentiments just in time to erase any credibility it might have.

Lord Jesus, thank You that that’s over.