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It has been so long since Van Morrison released a great album that I have almost forgotten how relevant he used to be. I remember lying in the garden on a rare hot Irish summer’s day in 1988 reading the NME, when that paper featured the likes of Deacon Blue, Lloyd Cole, Prefab Sprout and Martin Stephenson, and wondering if there was anyone that Van was not influencing. The eighties were a very rich time for Morrison but as the nineties dawned it all became predictable and his muse seemed to become a little too predictable.

So here is his first solo album in three years following on from collaborations with Gail Lewis and Lonnie Donegan. Nigel Williamson in Uncut magazine calls it a masterpiece and initially you are encouraged. There is a more organic feel to the work and Brian Kennedy’s backing vocals are not strangling it. It seems looser and much more of a looking back to Into the Music. However it doesn’t take many plays to realize that excited and all as you are that Van is returning to his better days (that in itself sounds like a Morrison song title) that maybe Bono has never been proven more right when he sings “You glorify the past when the future dries up.”

Down The Road just lacks. It doesn’t lack the old Van pet subjects like his paranoia about the music industry and the media. In "Talk Is Cheap" he comes across as his good grumpy self almost indeed a Belfast hard man in threatening someone’s girlfriend if she speaks out. It doesn’t lack in its looking back for a past vision though this time it is not so much childhood as an adult epiphany or nostalgia. In "Down the Road he sings, “All our memories, dreams and reflections/That keep haunting me.” It doesn’t lack in that criss-crossing the Irish sea for place names and of course Belfast sites and streets get their fair share of the lyric sheet. On "Choppin’ Wood" we are nearly reliving a "Cleaning Windows" scenario though about someone other than Van. It doesn’t lack in the importance that radio has had throughout his work. Hey Mr. DJ is a cry to those radio waves of his youth to become some healer and solace. It doesn’t lack in the sense of that old spiritual rapture that gave him his meditative niche for a period. And yet as you look closer there are less specific references to such things.

But it does lack. It lacks something new. It lacks something to grip you to return over and over again. It is surely his best for a lengthy period of time and though you might return to it occasionally it will not be before the Van albums that remind you of how current and influential he used to be ­ Astral Weeks, Moondance, Into the Music, Beautiful Vision, No Guru, No Method No Teacher, Avalon Sunset, Poetic Champions Compose…Oh my goodness. Glory days. 

Steve Stockman 5/20/2002