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Van Morrison - Keep It Simple
| Ew | | The title track shows that time has little withered Van Morrison's voice. He could sing ''blah-blah-blah'' and it would be pretty great. This is, in fact, what he does near the end of ''Behind the Ritual'' — and it is pretty great. True, there are moments during this self-penned collection of bluesy numbers that the Irishman does indeed Keep It Simple, but perhaps too much so, and it comes off as Rather Too Easy instead. Van sounds like he's lightly perspiring on a few songs, however: the heartfelt ''Lover Come Back'' and the downright jaunty ''School of Hard Knocks.''...full text |
| | Rollingstone | | At this point in his career, Van Morrison is less interested in surprises than in further exploring his long-standing obsessions: surviving the shocks of this life and rising gracefully toward the next one. Keep It Simple finds him looking back on his sixty-two years, filled with longing — for home, for deliverance from the world's demands, for spiritual transcendence. He boasts of surviving the "School of Hard Knocks," wryly chronicles a newfound sobriety in the aging roustabout's lament "Don't Go to Nightclubs Anymore" and sails into the mystic on the album closer, "Behind the Ritual....full text |
| | Courant | It's been years since R.E.M. flat-out rocked. The veteran band spent its past few albums exploring musical textures and gauzy atmospherics, and while it surely filled some creative need, the experimentation on "Reveal" in 2001 and "Around the Sun" in 2004 mostly felt aimless.
The group has refocused in a big way on "Accelerate," turning itself into a brawny riff machine that makes the trio's 14th album vibrant and lively. R.E.M. worked relatively quickly on the songs, shaping them on stage with a handful of shows in 2007 and then moving immediately to the recording studio with producer Jacknife Lee....full text |
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Van Morrison lyrics |
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