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Van Morrison: Keep me Singing

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Caroline Records
Released: 2016.09.30
Time:
 56:33
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Van Morrison
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.vanmorrison.co.uk
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Let It Rhyme (Van Morrison) - 3:54
[2] Every Time I See a River (Don Black / Van Morrison) - 4:43
[3] Keep Me Singing (Van Morrison) - 3:39
[4] Out in the Cold Again (Van Morrison) - 7:06
[5] Memory Lane (Van Morrison) - 4:08
[6] The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword (Van Morrison) - 3:51
[7] Holy Guardian Angel (Van Morrison) - 6:18
[8] Share Your Love with Me (Alfred Braggs / Don Robey) - 4:11
[9] In Tiburon (Van Morrison) - 5:18
[10] Look Behind the Hill (Van Morrison) - 2:28
[11] Going Down to Bangor (Van Morrison) - 5:18
[12] Too Late (Van Morrison) - 2:48
[13] Caledonia Swing [Instrumental] (Van Morrison) - 2:54

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Van Morrison - Drums, Acoustic & Electric Guitar, Harp, Piano, Primary Artist, Producer, Alto Saxophone, Vocals

Enda Walsh - Engineer, Keyboards, Mixing, Percussion
Dave Keary - Acoustic & Electric Guitar
Liam Bradley - Drums, Percussion
Jez Brown - Bass
Paul Moore - Bass, Hammond B3 Organ, Trumpet
Paul Moran - Bass, Hammond B3 Organ, Piano, Trumpet
Anthony Kerr - Vibraphone
Nigel Price - Acoustic & Electric Guitar
John Platania - Acoustic Guitar
Paul Robinson - Drums
Robbie Ruggiero - Drums
Johnny Scott - Electric Guitar
Nick Scott - Bass
Fiachra Trench - Hammond B3 Organ, Piano, Electric Piano, String Arrangements
Neal Wilkinson - Drums
Laurence Cottle - Bass, Trombone
Tony Fitzgibbon - Fiddle
Kate St. John - Cor Anglais

Lance Ellington - Vocals (Background)
Ange Grant - Vocals (Background)
Dana Masters - Vocals (Background)

Alastair McMillan - Engineer, Mixing
Brian Masterson - String Engineer
Tim Young - Mastering
Justin Helton - Design, Layout

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Keep Me Singing received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 76 based on 8 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Keep Me Singing debuted at number four on the UK Albums Chart, and at number nine on the US Billboard 200. It sold 25,000 units in the US in its first week, with almost all of that figure in traditional album sales. It is Morrison's highest-charting album in the country, and third top 10 album.



Van Morrison does exactly what he wants, when he wants, and continually mines the past no matter the cost. It's been four years since the Celtic soulman issued a collection of new, original studio material (Born to Sing: No Plan B), but given the music, it could have been yesterday. Morrison has no interest in innovation, he's already done that. The pace here is (mostly) laid-back, the music drenched in jazz, R&B, blues, and classy pop. He revels throughout in an elegant slow burn; his lyric themes are bittersweet, melancholic, filled with emotional and symbolic memory; his longing for the previous prevalent. The first line on album-opener "Let It Rhyme" is: "Throw another coin in the wishing well/Tell everybody to go to hell…" atop skeins of country and R&B as he reveals his recalcitrance. Celtic folk burrows underneath soul in the title track, as a trio of female backing singers, swelling B-3, and a snare undulate beneath his lyrics: "Keep me singing, a new beginning/waiting for my change to come...." A breezy harmonica solo adds a twist, but this tune reflects (musically as well as poetically) the protagonist in "Tore Down à la Rimbaud" from 1985's A Sense of Wonder, who is far down the road, holding stubbornly to a hope he knows (like his countryman Samuel Beckett) will elude him. "Out in the Cold Again" is one of Morrison's finest torch songs in a decade. His delivery hovers just above a small string section and Fiachra Trench's Errol Garner-esque piano. "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword" weaves blues-drenched electric guitar and organ exchanges in a midtempo steamy groove appended to excellent backing vocals from Dana Masters and Lance Ellington. The lone cover is a gospelized-blues version of Don Robey's and Alfred Braggs' ballad "Share Your Love with Me." (It was originally recorded by Bobby "Blue" Bland in 1963, and made immortal by Aretha Franklin in 1970. Morrison's version lies closer to the original in spirit.) The singer revisits his time in the San Francisco Bay area for "In Tiburon," where a circular Celtic jazz melody flows under his poetic lines as they name check various signposts in memory, invoking Beat poets, musicians, and locales. At its heart is a mysterious person he invokes over and again with the lines "Now we need each other to lean on…." A muted trumpet solo is misty, bittersweet, and tender. "Look Beyond the Hill" is a fingerpopping jazz tune with ghost traces of a "Moondance" musical feel, but without the magic hook. The outlier is "Going Down to Bangor," a raw blues, that directly references the early Chicago sound. Morrison offers his best blues shout and wails on harmonica. Keep Me Singing closes with "Caledonia Swing," an instrumental where skiffle, punchy R&B, and bluebeat ska rhythm (yes, really) come together in trademark style. Morrison delivers each of these songs with attentiveness; the material is consistently presented with finesse. Nothing further is required.

Rating: 3,5/5

Thom Jurek - All Music Guide



There have been very few constants over the last 50 years. Life, after all, is really just a long series of changes and fluctuations. One thing that we have been able to count on however — outside of death and taxes — is the arrival of new music from Van Morrison. Every couple of years, the Irish singer-songwriter steps into a recording studio to lay down some new tracks to offer up to the masses. Sometimes its new material, sometimes its covers, sometimes its covers of his own old material like 2015’s Duets. Regardless of form, his albums consistently offer new windows into the mind and heart of one of the most enigmatic figures in modern pop/rock/folk history.

For his 36th studio album, Keep Me Singing, Van the Man has assembled a collection of 12 completely new and totally original songs to go along with a cover of the blues standard “Share Your Love With Me”, a song made famous by Aretha Franklin in 1970. The Irish balladeer is one of the few stratospheric personas (along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and maybe Bruce Springsteen) whose modern art is doomed to compete with their earliest work. We don’t expect Morrison to recreate Astral Weeks or Moondance, but we read deeply into the new material to pick out pertinent autobiographical threads. It’s hard to resist the urge to try and discover how he’s evolved from the young man of his most vital creative periods.

As a whole, Keep Me Singing is a record pierced with a severe, self-reflective melancholy. The angry youth of his “G-L-O-R-I-A / Gloria!” days is a distant memory. Morrison is no longer concerned with doing things “The Way Young Lovers Do”. Instead he seems more intrigued to explore the prospect of sustained longing like on the song “Every Time I See a River”, where he sings, “I can go days where nothing is wrong/ But it just doesn’t last very long.” Simple things like the sight of a river or the sound of a stream trigger memories of a love long lost. The same theme is explored two tracks later on “Out in the Cold Again”, where he laments being left stranded outside his paramour’s door. Inches of wood separate him from happiness, but it might as well be whole worlds away.

As a singer, it seems as if time has sanded away a lot of the grit in Morrison’s voice — which is an utter paradox. He’s not going to shoot off into the atmosphere the way he once did on “Caravan” or “Wild Night”, and instead remains at a cool midrange through most of the tracks. The subtleties in his delivery are far more discernible and the moments when he breaks out from his crooning demeanor to let it all hang out like on “Share Your Love With Me” or “Look Beyond the Hill” become truly thrilling. It’s an approach that marries perfectly with the saccharine melodies and laid-back jazz grooves that fill out the musical accompaniment behind.

And yet some things remain constant. To close out the album, Morrison, for the umpteenth time, evokes that magic word Caledonia on “Caledonia Swing”. Fans know that this single ancient word, which was the name that the Romans gave to the area now known as Scotland/Northern England, carries a lot of meaning for Morrison. Hell, he named his most famous band from the mid-1970s after it: The Caledonia Soul Orchestra. This one word might be the single totem that could unlock all the mysteries of the deepest corners of his mind. It could also just be a comfortable vocal tick. Regardless, the return to familiarity is a welcome one.

Corbin Reiffon - September 28, 2016
© 2007 - 2016 Consequence of Sound



Why still sing? That’s a question Van Morrison has been preoccupied with over the past few years, beginning with his defensively titled, uninspired 2012 album Born to Sing: No Plan B, and extending to a rote 2014 collection of re-recorded duets, the title of which felt like a justification for its own existence: Duets: Re-working the Catalogue.

Two years later, the Celtic folk icon is back with Keep Me Singing, a new album of original material, and once again, the stated theme is the very notion that Morrison is still recording in the first place. But unlike his past few efforts, Keep Me Singing finds the 71-year-old freshly reinvigorated, with the singer plunging as deep into his own sense of mystical self-discovery as he’s been since 2005’s Magic Time.

“Call it nostalgia, I don’t mind,” he sang on that record, and more than a decade later, nostalgia (and its side effects) is once again Morrison’s driving focus on this set of jazz-meets-blues tunes. Over ornate arrangements of piano, highly orchestrated string sections and delicate trumpets, Morrison reminisces about 70’s Bay Area bohemia, gently recalls the Northern Irish countryside of his adolescence, and expounds on the transcendence of hearing Sam Cooke on the radio.

For Morrison, relying on the mystery of one’s own memory and personal past is the only way to navigate an increasingly uncertain future. “I got to go way back in my memory bank / To see how it ought to be now,” he sings over a mid-tempo R&B groove on the title track. If Van hadn’t already made the point clear enough, there’s also a deeply haunting song called “Memory Lane.”

Morrison’s voice has lost some of its sheer power, but he has retained all of its deep expressiveness, still every bit the otherworldly musical instrument it’s been for the past half-century. As far as songwriting, Morrison keeps the on-the-nose clunkers to a minimum with a few tossed-off numbers like “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword” and “Every Time I See a River.” More often, Morrison retreats into spiritual self-discovery on highlights “Holy Guardian Angel” and “In Tiburon.” As the songwriter himself puts it, “Now I’m back here again with more questions than answers.” Keep Me Singing proves once again that Morrison is always at his best when that’s the case.

Rating: B+

Jonathan Bernstein - September 27, 2016
Entertainment Weekly  - Copyright © 2016 Time



This year, Van Morrison was knighted, turned 71 and reissued a fantastic set of 1973 live recordings (It's Too Late to Stop Now). You won't find that intensity of soul fire on his 36th studio record. Yet through arrangements elegant to a fault, his mercurial tenor, more supple and restrained, remains a marvel. See the set's one cover, a reading of "Share Your Love With Me," that splits the difference between the Bobby "Blue" Bland and Aretha versions, full of chortles, snarls and gospel-tinged hollers. The vintage chill of "Every Time I See a River," meanwhile, is an invitation to float downstream with a blues admiral.

Rating: 3/5

Will Hermes - September 29, 2016
© Rolling Stone 2016



Van Morrison remains a beautifully mercurial creative force. Thirty-six discreet recordings into a 52-year career, Morrison has only Ray Charles and Willie Nelson, as poly-genre conquering peers, each of whose reach has proven to be expansive and penetrating. This is a rarified trio, to be sure, a very selective club that needs be no larger. Morrison's last recording of new material, Born to Sing: No Plan B (Blue Note Records, 2012), was an upbeat effort that was, or course all Van Morrison.

In his Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD Richard Cook posited that the late pianist Gene Harris always ended up making the same record...but that was all right, because of the elevated quality of the recordings. If imagination and ingenuity are the measures, Morrison does the same thing. While each of his recordings will have its own personality, they will still be undeniably Van Morrison. Which raised the question, "What is a bad Van Morrison records anyway. Whether listening to his seminal recordings from the 1970s, his Celtic hallucinations of the 1980s, or his idea of jazz in the 1990s, the listener always knew who was in the driver's seat. That blonde Irish honey-and-Quaaludes slur stirred into rock, country, R&B, blues just as well be a part of the grand unified theory of everything.

On his current recording, Keep Me Singing, Morrison turns on the air conditioning and relaxes. There are no hard R&B edges to be found on the baker's dozen of songs here. The singer resurrects Nelson Riddle in Fiachra Tench, who provides lush strings throughout. These strings, along with a copious dose of Hammond B3 seasoned throughout, cushion Morrison's stream-of-conscious lyrics among soft tones and well-behaved melodies. Clever are his lyrics on "Let it Rhyme,"

"Put another coin in the wishing well / Tell everybody just to go to hell / let it rhyme / in time / you'll be mine..."

"The Pen is Mightier than the Sword" is the closest thing to the blues here, with sharper electric guitar and percussion. But it is still tame when compared to "Gloria." Morrison tries to include a "Cyprus Avenue" and "Rough God Goes Riding" on every recording and he has representatives here: "In Tiburon" is a muse on the Bay Area and all of the music made there, while the gospel tinged "Holy Guardian Angel" reminds us that there is something out there bigger than we are. Morrison continues to wind is way down that Gaelic road toward eternity, rarely looking back. He ends things magically with the tuneful and sincere "Caldonia Swing." How Wonderful!

Rating: 4/5

C. Michael Bailey - October 8, 2016
© 2016 All About Jazz



In dem Song „Let It Rhyme“ singt Van Morrison: „Let it rhyme/ In time you’ll be mine.“ Das Keyboard seicht, eine Pedal-Steel-Gitarre seufzt, Streicher sülzen, Chorgesang setzt ein, dann tönt eine Mundharmonika, die Orgel spielt ein Solo, Van singt: „Too much water flowing underneath the bridge.“ Am Ende fragt er: „Can you meet me at the wishing well?“ Ist das noch Muzak – oder schon Weisheit?

Es ist natürlich Weisheit. Van Morrison schreibt jetzt all die Songs, die Rod Stewart demnächst singen will. „Every Time I See A River“, dumdidumm, dippeldidapp, huu-huu, gestopfte Trompete, „I don’t need your picture at the wall“, „Every time I hear a sad song/ It reminds me of what we had been/ Feels like we’re in love again/ Just can’t stand it no more/ Haven’t heard your voice in quite a while“. Das gesamte Ambiente dieses Albums, seine Refrains und Arrangements, seine Phrasen und Phrasierungen, seine Brücken und Ornamente sind fürs Wohlgefühl eingerichtet. „You keep me singing/ It’s a new beginning/ When the day is done“: Die Harmonika schwingt sich auf, Vans Chorsängerinnen glühen.

WENN ES DUNKEL WIRD ÜBER MEMORY LANE

Jedes Stück ist wie gemalt, jede Wendung sitzt, alle Klischees stimmen, jeder Musiker hat 24 Karat, und in der Kurmuschel brennt noch Licht. Und lustig ist es auch noch: „I was Mr. Nice Guy too long/ And I found out/ That was wrong.“ Heißt „Out In The Cold Again“. The cold black night.

Nach vier Liedern ist man ergriffen, dann kommt „Memory Lane“, die Gitarre zirpt, jetzt steigt Mark Knopfler ein, man liegt am Boden, und bei „In Tiburon“ kann man sich nur noch Elysien vorstellen, Shangri-La, wenn nicht die Shangri-Las, den schönsten Ort der Welt. Mit „The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword“ variiert Van eine seiner liebsten Stanzen, musikalisch listig als formelhafter Tanztee-Gospel inszeniert. „Caledonia Swing“ beschließt die Platte mit Caledonia Swing, so wie „Celtic Swing“ vor 33 Jahren der einzige Celtic Swing war.

Alles Ungebärdige ist aus den Songs des Van Morrison gewichen, er schreit auch nicht mehr, aber nun ist er auch 71, und was soll die Nörgelei, wenn es dunkel wird über Memory Lane? Wir wollen den Meister loben. (Caroline)

Arne Willander - 29. September 2016
RollingStone.de
 

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