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March 29, 2024, 08:10:39 AM

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New Van Morrison album: Latest Record Project, Volume 1. Has he gone nuts?

Started by millwall32, May 13, 2021, 06:10:32 PM

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Dusty Substance


A surprising 8/10 in Uncut.

A less surprising 1/5 in The Guardian.


PlanktonSideburns

[actually no, might be a bit of a twatty joke]

if only van had my ediotorial hindsight

millwall32

To me it's a bit like Dylan's Christian phase or Neil Young's Regan phase. Sometimes creatives just adopt a pose so they can get a bit of material out. It's always up for debate whether they mean it.

Oz Oz Alice

With his repeating of the title over and over again, he may be aiming for some kind of Gnostic mystic / blues chant but he comes off more like Wesley Willis.

Ant Farm Keyboard

Quote from: millwall32 on May 13, 2021, 10:30:18 PM
To me it's a bit like Dylan's Christian phase or Neil Young's Regan phase. Sometimes creatives just adopt a pose so they can get a bit of material out. It's always up for debate whether they mean it.

Morrison had such a mean streak for years, but it was just a couple of songs on each album. There was "New Biography" that marred the otherwise fine "Back on Top", "They Sold Me Out" on "Magic Time", etc. So, this isn't just a phase.

Because of the pandemic and the lockdown, I guess that Morrison had a lot of time on his hands as he couldn't tour, and instead spent his days writing. This album is basically a mirror piece to the "Contractual Obligations" session. The session was a fuck you to his record company as he gave them unreleasable material. This time it's a fuck you to all of his detractors, critics, record company executives, so-called fans, etc. who feel his best stuff is from the sixties and the seventies, and that his current material isn't up to these standards. Instead of complying with them, he comes up with enough new songs to fill an entire setlist, stuff that he regards as as good as anything he's ever released, but that these idiots will fail to properly recognize instead of learning their lesson.

If so, he's highly delusional, because, well, some of the lyrics are highly embarrassing. I have no idea if he usually writes so many songs that settle scores with his dissenters and discards most of them before entering the studio, or if he was particularly angry this time, prompting him to write and record a ton of them, but there had been some unwelcome pettiness on his studio albums for a long time.