Morrison’s longstanding sense of distrust – the result of some dubious contracts he signed in the 1960s – long ago calcified into a Weltanschauung in which everyone was lying, with the exception of a certain Northern Irish singer. He’s sounded like a conspiracy theorist before – on 2005’s They Sold Me Out, he averred that being “sold out for a few shekels” was “the oldest story that’s ever been told”; “brainwashed the suckers again and perpetrated the myth,” he sang on 2008’s School of Hard Knocks, “propaganda far and wide” – but on Latest Record Project Volume 1, the sheeple are truly awoken.
It’s MI5 this and mind-control that, secret “meetings in the forest”, mainstream media lies and Kool Aid being drunk by the gallon. On Western Man, there’s some troubling alt-right-y stuff about how the west’s “rewards” have been “stolen” by foreigners unknown and we should be “prepared to fight”. And he’s convinced that the shadowy forces of the establishment are engaged in efforts to silence him: “You have to be careful of everything you say”, “I’m a targeted individual”. The latter seems a fairly weird claim to make in the middle of a two-hour long album released by a major label: as far as can be ascertained, Sony is a multinational conglomerate with interests in banking and insurance, rather than an anarchist collective devoted to fearlessly speaking truth to power. Clearly the shadowy forces of the establishment need to up their game a bit.
This tinfoil millinery is interspersed with a variety of more predictable and even more enervating rants. These precisely replicate the experience of going back to your parents’ for lunch and discovering that – oh Christ – they’ve also invited Brian, their embittered old bore of a neighbour, who, as usual, has a couple of drinks and starts holding forth over the chicken chasseur. Social media is for idiots and anyone on it should get a life (Why Are You on Facebook?); modern music is awful and it’s all made on computers (Where Have All the Rebels Gone?); most of these so-called doctors don’t know what they’re talking about (Psychoanalysts’ Ball); say what you like about him, but Nigel Farage is a man of his word (Double Bind). Your parents have invited Brian because he’s been on his own since the divorce, and, with a crushing inevitability, you hear a lot about that as well: the iniquities of the legal process (The Long Con), and the injustice of handing over money to an ex-wife “too lazy to work” (No Good Deed Goes Unpunished). It seems a miracle there aren’t songs called These New Speed Bumps Outside the Primary School Are a Disgrace, The People I Got In to Do My Patio Were a Couple of Bloody Cowboys, and Have You Seen The Repair Shop? It’s the Only Thing Worth Watching These Days.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/may/06/van-morrison-new-record-project-volume-one-reviewOne star out of five (I don't know if they ever give zero).
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