Van Morrison
Keep it Simple
(Lost Highway, 2008)

According to the press materials that accompany Van Morrison’s latest record, Keep it Simple, it’s his first album of all new material in nearly a decade. And that’s true enough. But Morrison and his label have continued to churn out plenty of compilations of the greatest hits variety over the same period. It all adds up to a not-so-subtle metaphor for Keep it Simple—an album that coasts, resting on the laurels of a great artist.

“It’s not going to be the same every time—you have to go through the ups and downs,” Morrison told an interviewer recently, discussing his latest creation. “It’s ups and downs, death and rebirth. It’s not going to be easy—unless you want to be doing the same thing at the same level all the time. I’m not relying on what I did years ago. I’m not a greatest hits act. That’s the difference between me and most of what’s going on in pop music.”

But his latest LP belies that admirable sentiment. Keep it Simple, arriving via Lost Highway, isn’t awful, it’s just mailed in and terribly ordinary. And for an inventive artist like Morrison, that’s perhaps a greater sin. The album plays like high-class elevator music. Songs like “Love Come Back”, a clunky and generic tribute to an absent lover, and “Song of Home”, with its half-baked homage to Morrison’s Celtic heritage, could be glossy covers of tracks off of Tupelo Honey or Irish Heartbeat. Even the plucky, swinging horn arrangements that have become his trademark are reduced to a few punctuating background blasts.

Lyrically, Keep it Simple subjects us to the worst kinds of clichés with tracks like, no kidding, “School of Hard Knocks”, where he sings: “I was educated by the school of hard knocks / Who’s gonna patronize me now?” This from the same guy who brought us the magical, mystical poetry of Astral Weeks and Moondance? I suppose we’re all entitled to a cliché now and then, and here’s mine: My, how the mighty have fallen. Heck, even 2006’s Pay the Devil, an uneven disc of country tunes, was admirable for its reach and ambition. Even where that record didn’t succeed, you could sense a certain focus and purpose that’s entirely absent here.

The idea behind Keep it Simple, implied by the title if not the press release, is to showcase Morrison in his element, inhabiting spacious grooves with his gruff vocals serving as a comforting source of wisdom and experience. But the same routine, no matter how expertly executed, has a tendency to get stale, and Morrison seems absolutely intent on playing it safe. In “Song of Home”, when he sings of arriving at a comforting and familiar harbor (“I can see the harbor lights / And the foghorn in the night”), it’s with resignation, not triumph, and the listener can relate. How many times does Morrison expect us to endure a bluesy shuffle with a lazy backbeat and some pentatonic riffing before we revert to a disc of his greatest hits (of which, thankfully, there are many to choose from)?

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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