Astral Weeks
| Van Morrison
Astral Weeks
Astral Weeks is the second studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was recorded at Century Sound Studios in New York during September and October 1968, and released in November of the same year by Warner Bros. Records. The album's music blends folk, blues, jazz, and classical styles, signalling a radical departure from the sound of Morrison's previous pop hits, such as "Brown Eyed Girl" (1967). The lyrics and cover art portray the symbolism equating earthly love and heaven that would often feature in the singer's subsequent records. His lyrics have been described as impressionistic, hypnotic, and modernist, while the record has been referred to as a song cycle or concept album.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
August 27, 1987. Morrison’s first full-fledged solo album sounded like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, “nothing but a stranger in this world.”
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Pitchfork
November 6, 2015. Generalized longing—for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself—is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane.
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The New Yorker
March 7, 2018. In November, 1968, the irascible songwriter from Belfast released a jazz-influenced acoustic song cycle that featured minimal percussion, an upright bass, flute, harpsichord, vibraphone, strings, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics about being transported to “another time” and “another place.”
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The Guardian
August 3, 2011. This is an album heavy with yearning, with an aching for the streets of Belfast, for the "gardens all misty and wet with rain", for being "conquered in a car seat". It marries folk and rock and blues and jazz and gospel, flute, harpsichord, vibraphone – to create these eight songs that don't so much play as wrap themselves around your legs, that get stuck beneath your fingernails.
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All Music
Astral Weeks is a justified entry in pop music's pantheon. It is unlike any record before or since; it mixes together the very best of postwar popular music in an emotional outpouring cast in delicate, subtle musical structures.
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The Ringer
November 28, 2018. Across space and time it links a secret society of people: dreamers, romantics, doomed souls, defiantly persistent stutterers—and the love that loves that loves that loves—in the language of the heart. “It made me trust in beauty,” Bruce Springsteen once said of Astral Weeks, one of his favorite records.
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Lester Bangs
1978. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim
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The Vinyl District
May 20, 2015. Astral Weeks is one of the best rock LPs ever recorded and certainly in my Top Ten, and this despite the fact that I don’t even like half of its eight songs.
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Independent
October 23, 2015. An album so timeless it re-casts its spell each time you hear it.
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The Atlantic
April 3, 2018. The album was conceived in the milieu of Timothy Leary, recorded with session musicians fresh off commercial-jingle gigs, and only gradually recognized as something like magic.
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Pop Matters
June 23, 2004. . . . I put on Astral Weeks. I was mesmerized. It was absolutely brilliant in a sparkling, shimmering way. Yet, I would learn that its poetic obscurity and antiphonal jazz instrumentation had its own story, engendering the album with a profundity beyond what I gleamed upon listening.
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Classic Rock Review
December 13, 2013. With a blending of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, Astral Weeks was a complete departure from anything Morrison had done previously and the impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness nature of the music has received critical acclaim for four and a half decades and counting.
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Sound of Summer
December 24, 2014. The real strength of Morrison’s music lies in its originality, its spirituality, its depth and its life affirming freedom. Nowhere is this more evident than on Astral Weeks. This is an extraordinary album on so many levels. It has influenced generations of musicians and yet before Van walked into the studio he had never met much less played with most of the jazz musicians who played on the album.
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Best Classic Bands
Sir Van’s discography may list Blowin’ Your Mind! as his first album, but Astral Weeks can be justly regarded as the first album that showed us his Celtic soul, his true debut as a unique modern bard.
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National Public Radio
February 28, 2009. Originally released in 1968, Astral Weeks has routinely been named in music polls as one of the best records of all time.
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Elliot Imes - Medium
May 17, 2017. And does it need to be said that Van Morrison is one of the best singers to ever live? He is transcendent on this record. His voice can do anything.
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Greil Marcus
April 12, 2018. Van’s singing on this album seems to represent an attempt to communicate all he knows and all he feels, never letting down, never throwing away a line, not coming on like The Grand Preacher of Love and Sorrow, just excitement and emotion in a brash yet committed manner.
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Will Self
December 18, 2017. It is – almost all would acknowledge – a great album, and moreover one that’s constituted by a suite of eight songs, one flowing seamlessly into the next, so as to give the whole the feel of a single through-composed piece.
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The Journal
October 13, 2018. The story of ‘Astral Weeks’ is a completely unlikely tale of love, stress, poverty, and – eventually – triumph. Ultimately, it’s the story of how a 23-year old introvert from east Belfast overcame the mob, US immigration, poverty, and his own tricky personality, to make one of the most enduring and best-loved albums ever recorded.
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Beat Magazine
Over 47 years ago, Morrison recorded the eight tracks that make up both sides of Astral Weeks. Initial poor sales did nothing to stop the album becoming a critical favourite, . . . .
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Chicago Tribune
November 30 2018. These songs were long, more circular, less melodic. They were structured around a voice, rather than a backbeat. Acoustic instruments, piccolos and flutes replaced electric bass and guitars. Percussion was sparse: spring showers rather than a thunderstorm.
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John Meagher
November 17, 2018. When Van Morrison released Astral Weeks 50 years ago this month, most people could scarcely believe that someone who had just turned 23 had written mysterious, poetic songs of rare complexity.
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Uncut
December 1, 2015. Possibly the most sui generis album ever created, Astral Weeks, no matter how many times you’ve listened to it, somehow weaves its magic anew each time you return.
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Sound Opinions
November 23, 2018. Van Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks didn't produce huge hits, but as Jim and Greg explain, this record is unique from any other in Van Morrison's collection, and in fact, in rock history. Astral Weeks melds rock, blues, folk and jazz in such a way that makes it hard to define.
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Piero Scaruffi
The most erudite contribution to reforming folk-rock came from the former vocalist of Them, Van Morrison, who quickly established himself as the most significant musician of his generation. The lengthy, complex, hypnotic, dreamy jams of Astral Weeks (1968) coined an abstract, free-form song format that blended soul, jazz, folk and psychedelia and was performed with the austere intensity of chamber music.
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Off The Tracks
November 29, 2016. There might be better Van Morrison albums – ones you prefer – but this stands, to me, as a proud artistic statement. A record that was a shared vision, dreamed up worlds that Van Morrison wanted to capture; caught because a gaggle of jazz and session musicians were the chosen ones to create a version of folk music that has an otherworldly feel to it; part Boho-chic, part gipsy pigsty, part campfire jazz.
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The B-Side
November 29, 2018. It has been described as nearly perfect, transcendental, and is regarded as one of the best albums of all time. Exactly 50 years ago today, Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks (1968) was released, and its impact on music continues to remain remarkable.
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Time
December 6, 2018. This November, Van Morrison celebrated the half-centennial of his album Astral Weeks, on which the Irish troubadour added his rousing high baritone to a watercolor landscape awash with genres so thoroughly blended it nearly rendered the idea of categorizing music obsolete.
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Acoustic Sounds
1968's Astral Weeks remains not only Morrison's masterpiece but one of the greatest records ever made.
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The Morton Report
October 26, 2015. Nearly half a century after it first appeared in 1968, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks remains one of the most indispensable albums of the entire rock era. The music is moody and ethereal; it floats through the air like some magnificent dream. And the 23-year-old Morrison’s rants on life, death, and the Belfast backstreets of his native Northern Ireland sound worldly-wise and like nothing you’ve heard before.
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CU Independent
February 12, 2016. Astral Weeks is brilliance in musical form. The entire album is a stream of consciousness, blending together elements of folk, celtic and rock music to create a beautiful and mystical piece of timeless art.
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Paste Magazine
October 30, 2015. It’s a real hybrid; the bluesy twang of Morrison’s voice, the folk and classical underpinnings of the musical arrangements, the jazz cadences.
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Spill Magazine
While the albums core is folk-rock, its blend of jazz, baroque and vocalese singing made it arguably the most unique record of the year. Along with its influence on musicians, Astral Weeks continues to place highly in “greatest albums ever” polls.
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RTE
December 7, 2015. Now he was searching in the great unknown of musical experimentation, with no guru, no method, no teacher. He was to make an album that would yield no singles and fail to chart, but in the aleatory log-book of Kerouac and the Beat sensibility, it's up there at number one.
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Huffpost Reviews
February 27, 2009. . . . Astral Weeks featured no hit singles, sales were not impressive (it finally having turned “gold” by 2001), and to new listeners raised on pop radio, it was a challenging amalgam of folky-blues, jazz, northern soul, and singer-songwriter-styled lyrics. But historically, the LP was released at just the right time since, like the substances that supposedly were expanding the minds of a generation, this album did the same.
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Their Bated Breath
August 15, 2010. It’s impossible to pinpoint what exactly “it” is that makes this album so stunning. Everything about it is so unexpected, so open, casting a soft eye on the world. It’s the heart, mind and soul of a twenty-two-year-old tapping into genius. It’s amazing to think of a person at that age wise enough to create music like this.
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Analog Planet
January 1, 2010. Whatever the reverb decision and whatever the final EQ balance, Astral Weeks one of the great records of the rock era is destined to become one of the great reissues of the post-CD/analog revival era. Whether it's one of your favorite albums or you've never heard it, Astral Weeks belongs in any rock lover's record collection (even if it's not really a rock record) and this reissue is (or will be) the one to have!
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Morrison's vocals are stylistically much more narrow, and he's got even more players in the room fiddling away on their respective instruments.(JA)
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The Bluze
November, 10, 2015. The album is a song cycle of universal themes about youth: Astral Weeks – a yearning for spirituality and transcendence, Beside You – a desire for escape and belonging, Sweet Thing – exultation over youthful love, Cypress Avenue – An impressionistic remembrance of a first crush with the added barrier of class difference (Van’s imagining his girlfriend with six white horses and a carriage),
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The Times Literary Supplement
May 1, 2018. Astral Weeks (1968), a jazzy, primarily acoustic, song cycle with stream-of-consciousness lyrics that redefined Van Morrison as an artist, is commonly regarded as one of the greatest records in the history of rock and roll, . . . .
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Spectrum Culture
February 27, 2018. 1968 was the annus mirabilis in which Van Morrison recorded and released Astral Weeks, one of the most inexplicable and transcendent albums of all time, and all at the mind-boggling age of twenty-three.
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Treble Zine
September 8, 2011. There’s an autumnal streak throughout Van Morrison’s discography, but Astral Weeks is one of his gloomier albums. Nonetheless, it’s a refined and stately kind of gloom.
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WBUR 90.9
March 29, 2018. This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Van Morrison's album "Astral Weeks." It was released to little fanfare and has never been a top seller. But it's regarded as one of the most original-sounding and important records of the rock era.
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The Queens Tribune
2018. This coming November marks the 50th anniversary of a lesser-known, but equally singular, achievement of Morrison: the release of his 1968 album Astral Weeks. It is, perhaps, the most extraordinary album ever recorded in the history of popular music. Paradoxically, for the greater listening public, it is Morrison’s most-overlooked album of a catalogue spanning nearly six decades.
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Billboard
November 29, 2018. Despite its cool reception in 1968 and Morrison’s waffling opinion in the 21st century, Astral Weeks continues to ensnare new listeners to this day.
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