Word: astral
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...Gypsy" signals a retreat for Van back into himself. It is in no way transitional. In both form and content the album strongly resembles Astral Weeks. Van's debut album for Warner's. With it, he continued to confront his personal problems, while changing the texture of his music. Saint Dominic's Preview is almost entirely a return to both. There are only seven songs, two of them over ten minutes. Five of those songs are personal statements, indicating that Van has again begun to face some of the same problems that made his earlier music so creative...
...courses and services as well. One of the busiest is the Metaphysical Center in San Francisco. Its book department sells out 65% of its $25,000 stock every month. The center also presents tarot-card readings, daylong crash courses in palmistry (at $25 each), reincarnation workshops, and classes in astral projections, numerology and the esoteric Hebrew mystical system, the cabala. There is even a gift shop that sells
WHEN VAN MORRISON composed and wrote Astral Weeks, he lived over on Green Street, between here and Central Square. The album was a transition. Van Morrison had been called "moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright willful," as Them's lead singer. His first solo album, Blowin' Your Mind, included a song called "T.B. Sheets," eight or nine minutes of guttural rantings--the archetypal early Van Morrison song, embodying everything anybody'd ever called him, and all the while intensely creative. Astral Weeks moved away from all that, not so much in Van's writing, for the words still come from...
When Van sang "Astral Weeks" last Friday at the Orpheum, it wasn't the same. It was tighter, more solid, like the music he's made since the album Astral Weeks. At one point during his performance of "Cypress Avenue," the strongest song on that album and the one closest to his work on Blowin' Your Mind, he said, "I don't wanna tell you about all of that Belfast pain and suffering." With that statement he summed up his music after Moondance: a more joyous, tighter, harder rock music, like his early music, but much more secure lyrically. There...
...also a reminder of the jazz influences present in his music. Just as Astral Weeks was centered around a cool jazz feel, there are still jazz elements in Morrison's later music. "Moondance" has always been a jazz song. The live version has an intimacy, a lightness characteristic of cool jazz, of nightclub music, that the smoke-filled cavernness of the Orpheum couldn't destroy. But for my six bucks, the best song of the night was a perfectly rendered fifties version of Erroll Garner's "Misty." Slightly electrified, the song was a magnificent example of transplanted, uptempo, fifties nightclub...