Van Morrison’s Latest Record Project is paranoid and Covid-sceptic – yet oddly good

It is sometimes said of great vocalists that they could sing the phone book and make it worth listening to. Well, there are moments on Van Morrison’s new album when you may find yourself wishing he would just wrap his golden vocal cords around a text as unremarkable as a telephone directory, and stop bloody moaning.

The Northern Irish singer-songwriter is 75, still in remarkably fine voice, and clearly filled with creative energy; this, you might think, would give him at least something to be grateful for. But his almost heroically grouchy 42nd album suggests otherwise. Entirely written and recorded during the pandemic, Latest Record Project Volume 1 is a sourly-titled double album (triple on vinyl) of 28 songs, during which he barely has a good word to sing about anything. The track listing speaks volumes: The Long Con; Big Lie; Diabolic Pressure; Blue Funk; Stop Bitching, Do Somethin’; and Why Are You on Facebook?, on which Morrison chides social-media users to “get a life! Is it that empty inside?”

Rarely shifting outside the comfortable parameters of 12-bar, three-chord blues, jazz, RnB and soul, it often sounds as though Morrison were just crooning lists of things that annoyed him. “No life, no gigs, no choice, no voice,” he grumbles on Deadbeat Saturday Night. He has been an outspoken critic of pandemic restrictions, though his pedestrian series of anti-lockdown singles are mercifully not included here. But he has more than enough bile to spare on They Own the Media, Where Have All the Rebels Gone? and the politically inchoate Western Man (who “has no plan”, apparently “because he became complacent / Let others steal his rewards / While he was dreaming”).

Following a recent divorce, there are also songs about the fickleness of women (No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Duper’s Delight, Love Should Come with a Warning) and the inequities of the legal system (It Hurts Me Too). Even his devoted fans get chided (Only a Song, Mistaken Identity) for being foolish enough to think they might know Morrison through his music. He concludes with the playground taunts of Jealousy, dismissing all criticism as unadulterated envy: “I made it in spite of you / You don’t have a clue.”

The infuriating thing is that there is a great album lurking here, one that a disciplined editor and more sonically adventurous producer might have uncorked. The virtuoso band stir up seamless if familiar grooves, while Morrison occupies the centre on saxophone, guitar and harmonica. He jabs at rhythm and melody as if trying to punch his way out of the songs, relentlessly driving everything along until, by some mysterious magic, he achieves moments of extraordinary transcendence in the unlikeliest places.

Double Bind, for instance, offers a paranoid discourse on mind control and posits Nigel Farage as its hero – yet it becomes all but irresistible as Morrison starts to improvise around the phrase “double trouble”, transforming it into a fluctuating stream of sound. Whatever else you think about the grumpiest old curmudgeon in the business, the man can surely sing.

Out on Exile/BMG now