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...possible that St. Dominic's Preview, his new album, is a retreat for Van Morrison. Which I'm not holding against him, mind you, it's just that his music life has been a crooked trail towards personal contentment, which he seemed to achieve in the domestic happiness of Tupelo Honey. The early, post-Them rantings of "T.B. Sheets," and "He Ain't Give You None," were nothing more than the transposition of his tormented personal life into his music. He began to solve those problems with Moondance, and finally dismissed them altogether for the connubial bliss of Tupelo Honey...
...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, and yet so agonizing...
...Listen to the Lion" is the album's most ambitious, and most complex piece. It differs from both "Saint Dominic's Preview" and "Almost Independence Day" in that it is completely straightforward. It is an intensely personal probing, a search for the lion that exists within Van Morrison. It is an attempt to summarize his recent past, and what may be his first attempt to confront the divisions in his personality that are audible in his music, and eminently visible in his live performance. The guttural rantings that make up the bulk of the song's eleven minutes are indeed...
There are two other songs on Saint Dominic's Preview, and each is proof of Morrison's musical roots, and his complex personality. "I Will Be There" is a tribute to fifties saloon music, with an added thank you to the big band era. Every aspect of the music combines for this effect, the guitar chording under the first chorus for added mellowness, the horns playing in their lower registers for a bigger sound, the classic fifties eight bar tenor sax solo, and the piano and sax phrases mixed in between the choruses. Van sings this in concert and follows...
...most part, Morrison has taken an unmistakeable step inward. In the three years since Astrai Weeks, Van Morrison has released three albums and his wife Janet has been on the cover of each. She is not on the cover of St. Dominic's Preview...