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Title: Overrated
Review: In 1968, Van Morrison, teamed with a collection of local jazz musicians and spent two days in a New York City recording studio to record Astral Weeks. The lack of time invested in the project and the jazz section's unfamiliarity with Morrison and rock music are fairly evident. The tracks, eight of them taking up forty-seven minutes, start out mildly pretty but sprawl out for a generous multitude of time with little development. Occasionally Morrison's brawny vocals will rise up and draw in the musical pap bacl from dullness, but never enough to save blatherers like "Madame George," "Ballerina" and "Beside You." The spring-ish title song and the passionate "The Way Young Lovers Do" are Astral Week's only thoroughly enjoyable moments. Morrison's lyrics are vastly overrated. They are occasionally sweet, but too predictably sentimental to be very striking. This overrated album sounds like what might have been a mildly enjoyable work stuck in its earliest, roughest demo stages.
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