Astral Weeks
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews | Artist: Van Morrison List Price: £9.99 Our Price: £7.98 You Save: £2.01 (20%) Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours  |
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 | Product Details: Release Date: 01 May 1987 Record Label: Warner Rating:   Sales Rank: 2134 | | Look for similar items by category:
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| | Customer Reviews: Pure Poetry, Perfect Songs (22 November 2008)Is this the greatest album of all time? Truthfully, I don't know. At the tender age of 18, I thought so. I had no concept of Van Morrison except for Dexy's great cover of Jackie Wilson Said. So, I got on the train to Chester, because they had Penny Lane Records, and I knew I'd find it there. I bought it together with St. Domininc's Preview, so that if I didn't dig Astral Weeks I'd have the album with JWS on and all would not be lost. From the floating, opening strains of the title track, I was immediately hooked. I had never heard anything so fresh, so free, and I already loved Dylan and The Beatles and - for good measure - Scott Walker, but nothing matched this, until I later discovered the likes of Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Neil Young, etc. But it has to be said - Nick Drake aside - none of the others mentioned ever released an album as self-contained, as cohesive as this. It seems to exist in its own little bubble of time and space, and that time and space belongs to every person who rediscovers this, truly the greatest work of Van Morrison's fairly illustrious career. Perhaps that's why he decided to turn his back on it for so long, I don't know. Perhaps the weight of expectation created by its legend was outweighed by his need to carve out a career without succumbing to popular taste, i.e. to do his own thing. It really is difficult to fathom, when I read people saying they just don't 'get' this album, but each to his/her own tastes, I say. No amount of flowery prose will ever make me 'get' i.e. Joni Mitchell's Blue, though I like it a lot more than some of hers. Or anything on earth that will ever make me 'get' OK Computer, which seems to have replaced Astral Weeks at the top of everyone's current lists. Or Stone Roses, which is just about as good as, say, The Scars to me, and certainly a league below something like Crocodiles by Echo and the Bunnymen, which was great at 14, but I don't wish to hear it now. One thing's for sure: I'll be listening to Astral Weeks long after all the rest has fallen by the wayside, along with other evergreen classics such as Bryter Layter, What's Going On, Harvest, Blood On The Tracks, I'm Your Man, Dream Letter, and many more as well. Thus: no words will ever do justice to the way these songs stir such deep emotions in me. Astral Weeks always was and always will remain the album of adolescent awakenings, wherein poetry and song walk hand in hand, and the results, almost by chance, far exceed the sum of the parts. If you don't 'get it' now you never will. That's life! Still, I can't help feeling a little sorry for those who would overlook the beauty and majesty of Van Morrison's finest hour. ...and he's Reviving it? (07 November 2008)No, surely not. But yes, Van Morrison is 'reviving' Astral Weeks on stage. He really shouldn't bother. This album is full of unlistenable blathering. Morrison tries so hard to be 'Poetic' and to sing with 'abandonment'. The result is a dog's dinner. I'd read about the album's 'Classic' status, and felt I'd been really duped. I won't be a ripped-off concert-goer. Not for this. Next... Conquered in a Car Seat (07 November 2008)How do you review an album preceded by its own legend? You do not, you yield helplessly, and, below its totems, meagrely offer libations, askance interpretation of mythology. Perhaps, I should stop at that, because my words can only obfuscate and sully the incommunicable wonders within the song. If you've not heard Astral Weeks, my initial reaction is to admonish you, but this sentiment is quickly and irresistibly overridden by the power of the truth, which is: I envy you. I found it too young, fourteen and a fool, but it was probably proper. It broke, then rebuilt, then ruined me again at that age, as my adolescent life and loves developed, always in reference to the sounds. They've continued to do so ever since. This is the only true Soul record, (no disrespect to Marvin Gaye et al), in that it is a man's soul, and nothing less, on wax. A soul with all its varieties and vanities, desires and despairs, its hearkening and heartbreak. Its glory. Its wretchedness. If an alien race from beyond the skies, without conception of the supernatural, arrived on earth, and was played this, they would immediately decide that this man must have been in communication with the angels. The same will be true for you, for any of us, who are determined to listen 'with' not 'through' our ears! Van says more in series of grunts and groans, or the possessed repetition of four monosyllabic words, than the rest do in their collective careers. Anyone who does not accept this, I disbelieve, not with my word, but with my blood. If you can make it past the second; "I saw you early this mornin'/With your brand new boy and your Cadillac" without falling apart, we do not stand on the same soil, nor beneath a shared sky. In short, the greatest example of aural (astral, surely?!) art in the last half-century. Hyperbolic subjectivity of the clearest kind, I make no attempts to deny or disguise this, but this is the stirring within my marrow after years of variegated kinship, constant change, that teaches me I must not only react, but act, even if my action is merely not knowing what to do. "I try to do my very best" he says. Heavens! Is this not all any of us wishes we could say and mean? You see, achieving everything demands effort! Ignore, if you must, my shambolic words, but do not ignore this...this rarest of things, a work of art as good as it is famous. From Them onwards, cannot hold a note.... (25 September 2008)I know that this is a classic, I know that it has sold a zillion copies and that it estblished Van as a "great and as an innovator." I know that everybody has covered "Moondance", probably even The New Christie Minstrels. In spite of all that, I cannot stand it. I am not concerned that it is very much of its time. I am not concerned that it was the start of endless records of two/three chord bashes. I am not concerned that it encouraged Van to play sax, which is not good. No, my dislike is very black and white - I can't BEAR his voice. It's a yes or no thing, I guess. I am sure that it is deliberate but he cannot seem to hold a note for more than half a beat, and his tone is so harsh. Listen to the middle section of Moondance - it would give an elephant migraine. When a flatmate played in incessantly when it first came out, those not in favour braced themselves in aticipation of the hard-edged squawks and clipped endings. It was christened "Astral Squeaks" and I cannot think of it as anything else. Also, I know that he is a very private person for one who tours endlessly, but why does he have to cultivate the on-stage persona of bad temper and aggression? You won't see that from Gary Brooker or any of his near-contemporaries, even on the Oirish scene. I tried again recently becuase my boy is playing a few numbers in a band. No, sorry, it's still unlistenable. In theory I should love this (03 April 2008)But I don't. It sounds like this music was made in the back of a van (no pun intended) by a bunch of drunks. It rambles all over the place and never gets anywhere for me. |
