Saint Dominic's Preview
| Van Morrison
Saint Dominic's Preview
Saint Dominic's Preview is the sixth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was released in July 1972 by Warner Bros. Records. Rolling Stone declared it "the best-produced, most ambitious Van Morrison record yet released." - Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
1972. The best-produced, most ambitious Van Morrison record yet released, Saint Dominic’s Preview presents an impressive assemblage of musical ideas that can be enjoyed on many levels. Though the album does not have quite the surface accessibility of Tupelo Honey, being melodically less predictable and lyrically more esoteric, its overall content is musically much richer and more adventurous.
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All Music
While less thematically and sonically cohesive than Van Morrison's prior albums, Saint Dominic's Preview nonetheless hangs together on the strength of its songs, an intriguingly diverse collection which draws together the disparate threads of the singer's recent work into one sterling package.
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The Vinyl District
2016. 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview is so great that, although two of its seven songs are so-so at best.
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The Irish Times
2015. The title song on this album strikes me as his most considerable work to date. It 's about sitting in San Francisco, watching a band march by, thinking how far he has come from Belfast and the rest of his past, realising that he has achieved what is thought of as success; and yet wondering why he still feels unfulfilled and in transit. It’s rooted essentially in gospel music, but sustained by that peculiar amalgam of urban styles which Morrison has made his own.
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The Young Folks
2017. When the smoke clears, Saint Dominic’s Preview remains one of Van Morrison’s most optimistic records, even though it was born out of a period of personal turmoil for the singer. It is often a celebration of life itself, a reflective piece that also leaves its listeners heartened by an overpowering adoration for the world around them.
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Head Stuff
2015. Released in 1972, Van Morrison’s sixth studio album would gift a song that stands to this day as a great example of the stream of consciousness style that runs through the majority of his work.
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Robert Christgau
"Jackie Wilson said it was reet petite," he shouts for openers, and soon has me believing that "I'm in heaven when you smile" says as much about the temporal and the eternal as anything in Yeats. "Listen to the lion," he advises later, referring to that lovely frightening beast inside each of us, and midway through the eleven-minute cut he lets the lion out, moaning and roaring and growling and stuttering in a scat extension that would do Leon Thomas proud. The point being that words--which on this album are as uneven as the tunes--sometimes say less than voices. Amen
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The Frisc
2018. One of the Irish soul master’s greatest albums was centered here. Like much about Morrison and our city, it’s not so straightforward.
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Oo Cities
"St. Dominic's Preview" makes one thing clear: Van was now making music for no one but himself. Morrison's passion for upsetting the expectations of pop music audiences reaches it zenith in his first lengthy, improvised pieces since Astral Weeks, "Listen to the Lion" and "Almost Independence Day."
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Aphoristic Album Reviews
Saint Dominic’s Preview is perhaps the quintessential album of Van Morrison’s early career, covering both punchy R&B pop craft like the opening ‘Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile)’ and artier impulses like the ten minute semi-improvisations that close each side of the original LP.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Despite marking Morrison's slide into rambling small-combo jazz, this is still professional to a fault and mostly entertaining. He does deliver a handful of pop tunes flavored with a female choir and earnest saxophone; the dance-friendly, ecstatically joyful "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile)" will have you jumping out of your seat, and its sophisticated, slightly atonal sax riff lifts it well above the usual Morrison love songs.
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