Van Morrison
Keep it Simple
Lost Highway Records
4 stars (out of 5)
More than any other artist, Van Morrison can make feeling the full weight of your humanity bearable by taking the worst things about being human and turn them into music that is joyfully, cathartically ecstatic.
But since 1997's
The Healing Game Van has seemed less interested in reaching for ecstasy in favor of strolls down musical memory lanes. Not only has the overall quality of his songwriting suffered during this time, but his band - once anchored by organist
Georgie Fame and former James Brown sax man
Pee Wee Ellis- has had players of decidedly reduced skill.
Still, there have been flashes of startling brilliance, like "Little Village" from
What's Wrong With This Picture? and "Celtic New Year" from
Magic Time.
Keep It Simple is, unfortunately, marred by the same drawbacks as its four immediate predecessors - including some garish, atrocious countrypolitan backing vocals - but its spare instrumentation and stronger songwriting let a little more of the master's brilliance shine through.
"No Thing" is the worst track here, but even it has a bit of charm, with Van intoning, "People come / and people go / one monkey don't stop no show." "How Can a Poor Boy," "School of Hard Knocks" and "Don't Go to Nightclubs Anymore," are a couple of notches better, especially the latter with Van's shout-outs to erstwhile collaborators Fame and
Mose Allison.
The punning "That's Entrainment" is a loping, rustic romance that enriches our vocabulary — entrainment simply means the synchronization of an organism to an external rhythm — and ends with Van whispering "You put me back in a trance," as if the magician has fallen under his own spell.
"Song of Home" is a country rewrite of "Irish Heartbeat," complete with twanging banjo; "End of the Land" is the mirror-image to "The Philosopher's Stone," with Van heading west out of town and driving all night "when things get out of hand."
"Keep it Simple" is, appropriately, the album's center, harkening back to the mix of cynicism and nostalgia that made
Hymns to the Silence a great work. Against simple guitar arpeggios, the older, wiser, Van concludes that life is but "illusions and pipe dreams on the one hand / and straight reality is always cold," therefore "we've got to keep it simple to save ourselves."
Very Van-like that such a jolt of pessimistic realism comes after the positively gorgeous "Lover Come Back," which quotes melody and imagery from Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" as Van's voice trades off with John Allair's sumptuous Hammond organ and Cindy Cashdollar's steel guitar.
"Soul," the disc's penultimate track, is one of its two classics. With an arrangement that's both brooding and uplifting — and an unexpected, perfect sax solo from Van himself — it's a perfect example of Van's lyrics and vocals combining to make something infinitely satisfying.
The finale "Behind the Ritual" is Van at his very best, drinking wine in the alley and talking all out of his mind in the days gone by, ripping off another sax solo, mumbling vocals, soaring vocals, nonsense scatting vocals, all adding up, if not quite to ecstasy this time, to a positively cathartic spiritual experience.
