Reviews
 What Happened?
The Lone Sharks
Nine Lives
Steve Winwood
Moneyland
Various Artists
I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)
Various Artists
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Toby Keith's 35 BIGGEST Hits
Toby Keith
It's A Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition)
The Lemonheads
About a Son
Otis Blue (Collector's Edition)
Otis Redding
Loaded
Wood Brothers
|
Van Morrison
The cover of Van Morrison’s Down the Road album shows the window of a music shop that reads “Memorabilia & Records”, with classic LP’s by Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, and others on display. Fact is, some of Morrison’s albums would have fit in quite well with the assortment that is presented, and Lord knows that he’s released enough albums over the years to fill the entire window. Down the Road does not show us any new side of Van the man. For the past decade or so, Van has vacillated between gorgeous reflections on the wonders of life and solid rhythm and blues workouts. This record falls squarely in the camp of the latter. With only a few tracks excepting, Down the Road is an R&B record, done exactly the way that anyone familiar with Morrison’s work has come to expect.
For all intents and purposes, Down the Road could have been a new Ray Charles album. The connection between Morrison and Charles has been fairly obvious since the mid-seventies, but here it becomes all too obvious, with the album hovering somewhere between tribute and interpretation. There is even a version of the covered-to-the-point-of-abuse “Georgia On My Mind”, a song that Charles made entirely his own on “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music”, way back in 1960. There is nothing that any singer could do to improve on Charles’ version, so the version here sounds perfunctory at best, as if it Morrison tossed it off with casual abandon.
The album is weighed heavily with R&B shuffles, i.e., the “Moondance” lope (“Hey Mr. DJ”, “Whatever Happened to PJ Proby”, “Choppin’ Wood”) and Irish waltzes (“What Makes the Irish Heart Beat”, “The Beauty of Days Gone By”, “Only a Dream”). Morrison philosophizes on his reasons for embracing his beloved R&B on the song “Whatever Happened to P.J. Proby?, a strange subject for his focus, especially since most Americans have no idea who this guy is. (FYI, P. J. Proby was an English singer best known for routinely tearing his pants during his live performances). Guys like Proby and Screaming Lord Sutch don’t really figure into any American’s idea of classic R&B, but Morrison observed the trend from Belfast, and that experience informs his impressions profoundly. On said song, he laments that there’s “not much to relate to anymore ‘less you want to be mediocre”. Elsewhere, on “Talk is Cheap” he sings, “You killed your savior, new one can’t be found. Talk is cheap, your savior’s highway bound,” as if to tell us that we’ve lost our way, straying too far from the core. Rather than break new ground, then, Morrison chooses the comfort of familiarity, making Down the Road an enjoyable tribute to days gone by.
Grade: 
 
|
More Music Reviews
More Movie Reviews
More Book Reviews
More Concert Reviews
Powered by Millennium Communications Inc.