June 26, 1997
Imagine you're an Irish rock and roller with roots in R&B and the sensibility of a beat poet, heady with the fervor of newfound love. Now imagine locking yourself in a studio for two days with brilliant jazz musicians to capture on record that reckless passion, and you'll have an idea of what Astral Weeks has to offer.
Van Morrison's second album is his finest work, an extraordinarily moving rumination on love, perfectly executed. Astral Weeks is broken into two four-song cycles that mirror William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, the first half exploring the shining devotion of youth, the second half aching with deep blue wisdom. Morrison chants out rhythmic, cyclical lyrics that evoke hopeless yearning and tender, wistful desire. His slurred, mystical scat vocals lay his heart bare, a flood of words with a sound as important as the ineffable meaning it reaches for.
His empathetic band mirrors this unconscious music of the soul with amazing facility. Jazz bassist Richard Davis is nothing short of incredible; his impressionistic, free-form counterpoint melodies make "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do" pulse with frantic, tense energy. And Connie Kay's supple drumming shuffles the title cut along for seven minutes of Van's flood-of-consciousness poetry.
"Sweet Thing" and "Madame George" are laced with strings and woodwinds and punctuated with R&B horns; the entire album has the timeless, organic feel of celestial free jazz and the earthy grounding of folk, a seamless fusion of fearsome beauty. The desperate passion of falling in love has rarely been expressed so eloquently.
- Jared O'Connor
Heady with the fervor
of newfound love