Beautiful Vision
| Van Morrison
Beautiful Vision
Northern Irish singer-songwriter released his thirteenth studio album—Beautiful Vision—on 16th February, 1982, through Mercury, Warner Bro., and Polydor Records. The album is a continued departure from his previous R&B songs, favoring more American jazz and Celtic folk themes in the music. Spirituality is a major topic in his songs, with some of them being based on Alice Bailey’s teachings. Some of the other songs reflect Morrison’s own Celtic heritage and Belfast background.
Beautiful vision didn’t gain much chart success despite its critical acclaims, peaking at number 44 on US Billboard 200, and 31 on the UK album charts. Read more about Van Morrison’s Beautiful Vision album reviews here!
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
1982. What’s remained constant is his emotional blending of the heart’s romantic and spiritual concerns. For Van Morrison, romance is religion, and there’s nothing more religious than a woman. Beautiful Vision is so emphatically half-great that if you dumped the four bad tunes, put the borderline case on hold and didn’t judge the instrumental, the LP’s sequential and thematic integrity would be strengthened.
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All Music
Beautiful Vision shares much sonically with its predecessor, Common One, being heavy on long, winding song-poems, moderate tempos, dense lyricism, and dated production. Still, this winds up being a stronger articulation of what Morrison was attempting to do on Common One -- much like how Wavelength got A Period of Transition right.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
2017. Morrison's next effort, Beautiful Vision, arrived in stores in February 1982, and while it represented a sudden turn away from the sprawling song structures and free jazz strains of Common One, it wasn't a return to the soul-influenced sound he'd mined to audience and critical acclaim in the '70s. Instead, Vision found Morrison doubling back to his roots; although each of the record's 10 tracks stood on their own distinct musical merits, the overall album took a decidedly Celtic tone.
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Alltime Records
2018. The insular world Morrison creates here isn't likely to appeal to neophytes, but Beautiful Vision is like a more mature, calmer version of Into the Music, and it's not as far from that album's greatness as it may at first seem.
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People
1982. The surly Irish mystic has made another astonishing album that is in the same league with his 1968 masterpiece, Astral Weeks, and its celestial 1970 sequel, Moondance.
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Alphoristic Album Reviews
Beautiful Vision is one of Van Morrison’s most settled, comfortable albums, like a calmer take on the Into The Music sound, and it’s relatively insular with its low key explorations of Christianity and Irish heritage.
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Rhino
2016. When Morrison returned with his next album, there was still a jazzy element to the tunes, but this time he was embracing a Celtic sound as often as not . . . . It may not be the most commercial album in his catalog, which caused some consternation among those on the business side of Morrison's career, but as its title implies, it's a beautiful one, and “Cleaning Windows” is arguably one of the best singles he released in the '80s.
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Adrian's Album Reviews
Van's voice is the reason to purchase the LP, alongside a couple or three fine tracks contained alongside 7 or so average tracks that merely sound very nice indeed. Sometimes that's enough though, isn't it?
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Robert Christgau
. . . this music is purely gorgeous (or at times lovely), its pleasure all formal grace and aptness of invention. Only "Cleaning Windows," a cheerful, visionary, deeply eccentric song about class and faith and culture, stands among his great tunes. But every one of these songs makes itself felt as an individual piece of music. And every one fits into the whole. A-
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
A return to shorter running times, and it looks like there's an unusually religious and mystical focus in the lyrics. (JA)
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Stereogum
2014. Whatever the case, this is another collection of unforgettable Morrison songs, from the amiable pop of "Cleaning Windows" and "Dweller On The Threshold" to the slow burn instrumental of "Scandinavia", which anticipates Sigur Rós years before their emergence.
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97.1 The Drive LIVE Stream
Morrison's next album, Beautiful Vision, released in 1982, had him returning once again to the music of his Northern Irish roots. Well received by the critics and public, it produced a minor UK hit single, "Cleaning Windows", that referenced one of Morrison's first jobs after leaving school.
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