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Van Morrison
Keep It Simple
(Exile/Lost Highway/Polydor)
First Appeared in The Music Box, April 2008, Volume 15, #4
Written by John Metzger
Mon April 28, 2008, 06:30 AM CDT
It truly is impressive how effortlessly prolific Van Morrison has been over
the years. While he has made his share of uneven endeavors, he has never really
given birth to an outright awful one, and when he gets on a roll, he can be an
utterly unstoppable force. Braiding jazz, blues, and soul textures together,
Morrison long ago settled upon a framework for his songs, thus creating his own
immediately identifiable sound. Although he has pitched from one side to the
other as he moved from his folk-mystic masterpiece Astral Weeks to the
collection of country covers he compiled for Pay the Devil, Morrison
never has strayed from the path that he paved for himself to walk. It would be
foolish, then, to think that, more than 40 years into his career, he would be
even remotely interested in junking his history in order to spring a bold, new
approach upon his fans. True to form, his latest endeavor Keep It Simple
revisits all of his now-familiar touchstones, from Ray Charles to Sam Cooke.
In recent months, Morrison has placed a ridiculous number of retrospective
sets on the market — including The Best of Van Morrison, Volume 3 and
Still on Top. Within them, he has sliced and diced his albums in a variety
of ways in order to highlight the variegated nuances of his catalogue. Yet,
almost in spite of the never-ending stream of reminders of his many, wonderful
accomplishments, Keep It Simple manages to shine. The music is fresh and
vibrant, a product no doubt of the first-take presentation that Morrison opted
to employ. When this looseness is combined with the heavy use of a revolving
slate of background vocal trios as well as the heady Hammond B-3 organ sounds
conjured by John Allair, the material often recalls the Jerry Garcia Band’s
laid-back, gospel-soul luminescence.
Other than jettisoning the horns that have graced many of his recent albums,
Morrison continues to work with a sizable backing band. Throughout Keep It
Simple, he adds and subtracts the pieces he needs in order to conjure
whatever mood he happens to want to create. Banjo, pedal steel, and mandolin
sweep through Song of Home, while a guitar rises to the forefront of
School of Hard Knocks. Nevertheless, his arrangements, for the most part,
aren’t terribly complex, which leaves the bulk of the instrumentation lurking
softly in the background, where it subtly shades, frames, and supports his
soaring, impassioned vocals.
On paper, Keep It Simple is, at first glance, not one of Morrison’s
stronger lyrical efforts, and this time, having the words to his songs spelled
out in the accompanying booklet might not have been the wisest move. Over the
course of the endeavor, he tosses one cliché after another, turning them around and around in a series of very repetitive
verses that ruminate upon sobriety, spirituality, and the difficulties of making
it through another day. When he’s on his game, though, Morrison could sing his
way through the phone book and make it sound important, and he uses this parlor
trick to transform the simplest of sentiments into message-laden mantras.
Reading along with him, however, undermines the impact that they have.
Morrison is far less curmudgeonly than has been his custom of late, and by
taking an indirect and non-confrontational approach to relaying his message, he
cleverly succeeds in making his point more effectively. All of the phrases that
he scatters throughout Keep It Simple — and all of the statements he has
made in 40-odd years of work — are tied together quite neatly within the title
tune as well as Behind the Ritual, the album’s expansive final track.
There’s nary a song, here, that doesn’t urge the members of Western society to
slow down and take pleasure in the wonders that surround them. The path to
enlightenment, it seems, often is obscured by the clutter that surrounds the
same daily routines that also can lead to salvation.  ½
Keep It Simple is available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2008 The Music Box
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