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52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Van paints his master piece!, 14 Nov 2005
By A Customer
Ah Astral Weeks. I remember being young and living with my dad, just the two of us, and my dad used to have his own architect office and he used to work late at night. He would work in the afternoon, stop working when I got home from school until I went to bed and then work until those lonely quiet hours of the early morning listening to his music. My bedroom used be open plan, so I could hear the music he played and every night I would lose the battle with sleep while listening to the likes of Highway 61 Revisited, John Coltrane's Soultrane, Blood On The Tracks, The Band and also Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Moondance…. Drifting between those shadowlands of being awake and dreamland while the music floated through the air into my bedroom trying to hold on because I didn’t want to miss any off the mystical glorious sounds I was hearing. Astral Weeks was always one of those records I found incredibly intriguing but that I never quite got, it seemed this guy was singing about things, and in a way that I could never quite fully understand, there was something manic and dark in his voice and the music, so much so that the album actually kind of scared me when I was young. I was far more at ease with Moondance, a slightly more straight forward album and a little less dark. I found the album hypnotising but I would always come away feeling slightly off balance after listening to it.Years later, when I started buying all the albums my dad used to listen to when I was growing up on CD, I rediscovered Astral Weeks…. I got both Astral Weeks and Moondance on CD and although Moondance still remains one of my all time favourite albums, I really fell head over heels in love with Astral Weeks. There's pure brilliance in the ramshackle yet amazingly beautiful performances of a man fresh out of a mental institution… the album sounds like nothing else before or since including Van's own albums. The band brilliantly flesh out Van's acoustic epical songs of heartache, longing and despair… at times heavenly beautiful at times ramshackle madness a beautiful blend between Irish folk and jazz and something altogether unique. A masterpiece.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the greatest album of all time, 23 Nov 2006
This is not an understatement. I have a large music collection, very large. I listen to no record as much as I have listened to Astral Weeks. It is genius from beginning to end and no pub poetry that I could produce could do justice to it. It is simply the deepest, darkest, brightest record I have heard in my life, surpassing the greatest of pop or rock and perhaps the greatest of jazz and classical, I don't know.
I care not whether you like my review, but look around at these other reviews, look up and down and you will see glowing, a kind of collective halo from those who have experienced the joy and the agony of owning and loving this record, embracing it like the aire they breathe as part of their lives. There is little comparable to this masterpiece, if you love music, if you reallly love music, this album insists on being in your record collection, and not to be put in alphabetical order with the rest of the plastic, but reserved simply for the place beside your record player for a lifetime.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cosmic man, just cosmic, 19 Jan 2005
By A Customer
I suppose the thing about Astral Weeks is that by listening to it closely it can take you to a place in your mind that no other piece of music can. It's a rather sad and lonely place I must confess yet somehow infinitely pleasurable as if it were touching the beyond.
See, I've come over all poetic now just thinking about it, just goes to show.
This album was recorded in 1968 and remarkably well. It was recorded with a small number of jazz session players and it sounds like the producer understood it as a jazz thing and not a rock album. This contributes immensely to the sound because it doesn't suffer any of the experimental production ideas of the era.
The music is all of a piece, a continuum that has been divided into 8 slices. On the original vinyl Side one was 'before' and Side two was called 'afterwards' not that it will help you understand the songs any better for that. Incoherent? Well, yes - just a little bit. But keep listening all those images will start taking on a meaning for you, bit like a kaleidoscope. Colourful too!
So five stars all round, my favourite album of all time and I've been listening [unravelling it ] for over thirty years.
How long? Yes really. You owe it to yourself to have a listen it really is as good all the reviews here say it is.
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