The Musicgoer: Van Morrison's Keep It Simple

VAN MORRISON
Keep It Simple
(Exile)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

When you’re on your 33rd studio album, like Van Morrison is with Keep It Simple, a little wheel-spinning and water-treading is probably inevitable—and forgivable. The man made Astral Weeks, for crying out loud; let’s cut him a little slack. But he’s still pushing his luck with songs like “Soul” (“Soul is a feeling, feeling deep within/Soul is not the colour of your skin”) and sleepy blues workouts like “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” and “No Thing,” both of which are celebrations of Morrison’s own boringness.

Morrison has said, “I felt I had something to say with these songs”—that line even appears on a sticker affixed to the CD wrapper—but there’s not much urgency to the lyrics here. Nothing political, no particularly tempestuous emotions getting expressed, just a lot of boilerplate Celtic-soul nostalgia about “going down to the end of the land” and “hearing the song of home.”

Morrison does provide something of a statement of his artistic philosophy on “That’s Entrainment” (his term for “living in the moment”), and the album closer “Behind the Ritual” is a genuine charmer, an evocation of Morrison’s days as a young singer, getting drunk and spinning out rhymes in the alley behind a club—over a simple ukulele riff, Morrison keeps swirling around the same three or four choice phrases, trying them out in different combinations, getting lost in the words and the memories they evoke.

Morrison may be keeping it simple, but when his music works, it does so in ways too complicated for almost anyone to duplicate.