[MUSIC REVIEW] Keep Me Singing (2016) by Van Morrison 🎵

A risk with Van Morrison's slightly reclined style and the fact that he has already written 400 songs is that it becomes difficult to surprise and avoid comparisons with himself. Keep Me Singing is by no means revolutionary or groundbreaking, but the now 71-year-old artist still glows with passion and there's a nostalgic, almost melancholic shimmer over many of the songs. His authentic and unique voice is still powerful and convincing.

Morrison thinks back to better and simpler times, remembers old loves - but is also open to new, as in the opening track "Let it rhyme". Musically, he's also back in an expression that feels like home, with blues, soul, rock, harmonica and Hammond organ in a combination that we already know he masters well. And perhaps it's precisely the fact that he has learned to accept the passage of time that makes the album feel a little more relaxed, and yet spirited, than some of his later works.

His 36th album fits unusually many classic Van Morrison elements. In "Everytime I see a river", perhaps the main track on the album together with "Holy guardian angel", he offers a ballad of the soulful kind that I thought he was incapable of still writing. The album has some flaws, naturally. A handful tiresome and dusty blues tracks that lack the poetic sensitivity of the best songs of the album, such as "Look beyond the hill" and "Going down to Bangor", but it still doesn't reduce the fact that Keep Me Singing is a worthy appendix to some of Van's greatest works.

Overall the album embrace us like a soft, warm blanket and provides all the warmth we'll need this autumn. Keep Me Singing is spiritual Celtic soul-jazz, wonderfully stuck on memory lane.

— SteemSwede

Van Morrison - Every Time I See A River