Van Morrison Into The Music

Morrison's best album of the '90s still casually hangs out in the spiritual world that served as his home for most of his '80s material, but the mystical touches are at least kept in check for a good deal of the time. Better still is that Morrison sings with a passion that had crawled into laziness during big, and crucial, chunks of his career (most prominently the early to mid-'80s). The songs, or more accurately (as the title makes very clear) hymns, combine the elements that have guided Morrison's best albums – R&B, folk, pop, Celtic, rock, even gospel – for a satisfying journey through the mystic and the real…

The days when we had to wait a whole year for a new Van Morrison disc seem so far in the rearview mirror as to be ancient history. The singer-songwriter, and lately master interpreter, has been cranking out product at an alarming rate. His new 40th release is his second in 2018. It comes after two others in 2017 which makes this the most productive the 73-year-old Morrison has ever been. They are long, too, over an hour each, providing bang for the buck.

On their wide musical journeys in the '80s, the Chieftains decided to collaborate with Van Morrison, who had an artistic peak at the end of the decade. The result was a highlight in both of their '80s productions: the traditional Irish Heartbeat, with Morrison on lead vocals and a guest appearance from the Mary Black. Morrisonand Moloney's production puts the vocals up front with a sparse background, sometimes with a backdrop of intertwining strings and flutes, the same way Morrison would later use the Chieftains on his Hymns to the Silence. The arrangement and the artist's engaged singing leads to a brilliant result, and these Irish classics are made very accessible without being transformed into pop songs…

Tupelo Honey is typical of Van Morrison's early-'70s work in both sound and structure; after dispensing with the requisite hit – here, the buoyant, R&B-inflected "Wild Night" – he truly gets down to business, settling into a luminously pastoral drift typified by the nostalgic "Old Old Woodstock."…

Beautiful Vision shares much sonically with its predecessor, Common One, being heavy on long, winding song-poems, moderate tempos, dense lyricism, and dated production. Still, this winds up being a stronger articulation of what Morrison was attempting to do on Common One – much like how Wavelength got A Period of Transition right…

BROWN EYED BEGINNINGS is a two-disc set that features material from Van Morrison's first solo sessions for Bang Records initially released as BLOWIN' YOUR MIND, and later as THE BANG MASTERS. The first disc includes the familiar tunes from those recordings, while the second consists of an untitled jam.