Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl

Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl reveals a newly energized Van at the top of his game, fully engaged in the proceedings, and ready and able to sail into the mystic.

Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl is not Astral Weeks, but it's brilliant and emotionally intense; it's honest and spiritually revealing.

By the time he closes with fittingly open-ended encores of 'Listen to the Lion' and 'Summertime in England'--neither of which is on Astral Weeks--he is truly gone. And in a triumph as unlikely as it is complete, Astral Weeks is reborn.

Transcendence is always a work in progress; the eight songs on Astral Weeks are still up to the task.

He rushes through the tunes, slurring syllables as if enunciating the lyrics would be too much work even if he could remember all of them. And clearly, one day wasn’t enough rehearsal time for his hired band, who are so often in vamp mode while trying to figure out where Morrison’s going that they lose track of the tunes.

All this deceptively timeless fluidity induces a wonderful mystic fog that might make you forget whether you're honoring a 40th, 5th, or 100th anniversary.

This is a stroke of genius.

Although much of the album is about saying goodbye to the past, Morrison uses the performance to breathe new life into the songs with a band that can follow anywhere he leads--jazz, folk or soul.

This is essentially Morrison pulling all stops in attempt to fulfill his never-ending quest for transcendence; in this instance, to transcend the average concert experience. Apart from the cover art that sees Morrison in a rather unbecoming pose (he looks more like a smarmy used-car salesman than a music legend), every aspect of this release remains vital.

At its weary, lovely close, it becomes clear that Live belongs not to the listener but to the artist who created it. And that makes this album one of the most vital and electric he's made in years.

Nit-pick all you want but this is a tour de force, heady, joyful, ambitious, elegiac and--as with the 1968 original--unlike anything else. [Apr 2009, p.99]

He pulls it off in style. [Apr 2009, p.91]