Van Morrison has an extraordinary knack for inventing brick walls to butt his head against, whereas anybody else would just walk right through. If an explanation were asked for, Morrison, resting between blows, would most likely answer: "Because it's there." This artist has staked his whole career on a wrestle with the unnamable. And unless you're sympathetic to such obsessions from the start, he can be a closed book–seemingly obscure, willful, often portentous, humorlessly full of himself. Morrison's argument is intractable by definition: he can change lives, but only if they chance to rhyme with his.
way of an evermore-overt turn toward Christianity, and outwardly, via a revitalization of his recording career. On
Common One, there's almost none of the knotty darkness and cryptically private imagery that have made him so difficult to many in the past. Instead, as befits the next step in his recent groping for serenity that began with the deck-clearing of
Wavelength (1978) and continued on last year's
Into the Music, the current mood seems calm and soothing.
Yet, in other ways, Common One draws the line more starkly between those who take Morrison the only way he can be taken (on faith), and those who don't take him at all. The material's open-ended, eddying musical structures (two cuts clock in at over fifteen minutes each) practically eliminate the hooks and ledges of conventional rhythmic machinery, leaving your ears with next to nothing on which to cling. And if the lyrics–for the most part, bald homilies about living in the country and being happy – are simple enough on the surface, much of their significance is still locked inside Morrison's head. In "Summertime in England," one of the fifteen-minute epics, the singer's penchant for the blandly pastoral is blended with a name-dropping guided tour of British poetry that initially sounds close to self-parody.
Since Van Morrison has always seen life as a mystic experience, his acceptance of orthodox Christianity can't help but reduce him in scale. Religion regularizes his cosmology and solves the mysteries he's forever chasing by offering the answers secondhand. In an everyday context, a line like "And the sufferin' so fine" is striking. Put inside the box of Christian theology, however, it comes out not merely trite but distasteful.
What saves Morrison – and makes Common One, despite its narrowness, boring stretches and large and small retreats, impossible to dismiss – is his unwilling, embattled awareness that inner peace is every bit as demanding as emotional warfare. Time and again, he finds that nothing is more difficult than becoming simple, and this makes him seem, paradoxically. more hermitically alone than ever. Morrison is attempting to explain his discoveries to an old audience (or a former self) from which he now fe
This overlooked gem finds Van in a pastoral folk-R&B-jazz mode on a series of extended pieces. It just isn't the mellow celebratory tunes that make this uncommon -- the sound is just special. Forget production; once again working with musician/arrangers Pee Wee Ellis and Mark Isham, Van crafts an organic beauty. For a crabby loner, the guy sure knows how to collaborate.
