Customer Reviews

Astral Weeks

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Astral Weeks...
Well I certainly wouldn't be elaborating upon my feelings for this album by saying that I think it is quite simply one of the best musical creations of our generation. This album transcends its successors in both its musical atmosphere, which in itself captures a lost idealism of the late sixties, and in its lyricism. Morrison has never been questioned with regards to his ability to infuse a song with the most beautiful and poetic lyrics, but what is sometimes in question is his ability to contain such powerful lyrics within his music - in Astral Weeks I believe he succeeds in both to such an extent that we never again here the vocal, lyrical, and musical intensity achieved in Astral Weeks, apart from a brief retrospection in 'Veedon Fleece'.
This album provides the greatest insight into what I deem to be the frustrated genius of Van Morrison, in my opinion the greatest singer-songwriter of our time, and I urge anyone remotely interested in experiencing a rare musical treat to get it.

I've been listening to this record (my favourite of all time) for 40 years. It's always sounded this good in my head, but now with this Japanese-made re-master it sounds superb coming out of the speakers.
I even realise I've been mis-hearing a few of the lyrics.
If you love this record and have a good audio set-up, this could let you hear it properly for the first time.

Perhaps it was because of musical tastes too similar to my peers or maybe just sheer bloody-mindedness. But it was with this album and artist that I chose to stand apart.

At 14 it was easy dismiss Van Morrison's uncompromising voice and Folk/Jazz backing as un-melodic and boring.

I resisted it's pull for nigh on ten years. But we all grow up and the first time I listened to it with an open mind I found myself captivated.

To describe Astral Weeks (as I sit here listening to it) is a task beyond my humble abilities except to say that it is as involving and rewarding a piece of music as anything else I have heard.

If you derive anything more than a beat and a dance groove from your music then you really should try it.

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.

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.

More than 40 years on, "Astral Weeks" sounds as fresh as the night it was recorded. Many reviewers have pointed out that this is one of the greatest musical statements of all time: a true musician's album, impossible to categorise, standing out distinctively even from the rest of Van's voluminous and consistently excellent body of work over 40 years. All played in one inspired spontaneous burst, in a 12-hour studio session by musicians who had little or no experience of playing together: in the can, done and dusted, a timeless classic created in one night in NYC.

Bursting with youthful energy, musical originality and jazz-improvisation, featuring some of the most inspired poetic lyrics ever committed to song, the whole beautiful, timeless marvel is carried along by strings, brass, flute, acoustic guitar and the most delicious driving bass playing you'll ever hear. And then there's Van's youthful and right-on-the-edge voice, articulating those poetic stream-of-consciousness lines with such power and conviction you feel he's baring his very soul.

This 2010 Japanese re-master restores the sound to a crispness and depth not heard since the original 1968 vinyl release when played on a top-class sound system. It really is so much better than any previous CD release. And an additional bonus: an 18-page insert with all the song lyrics in both English (thankfully) and Japanese, missing form all previous CD releases. If you love this album as so many of us do, and want to hear it as it should be heard, this is the one to buy. Why WB has not so far released this near-perfect re-master in the USA or Europe is incomprehensible: it's definitely worth the extra money.

Someone said of Astral Weeks many years ago: "You can't really say why it's so great. You have to listen to it to understand that. It just is."

Words like "seminal" seem somehow inadequate to describe "Astral Weeks." There's nothing else like it, nor ever likely to be. It's gorgeous, rich, delightful, transformative, inspired, a one-off. If you've never heard it, then it's time you did and this is the version to buy.

This is the remastered version of Astral Weeks I have been waiting a long, long time for, and it was certainly worth the wait! This Japanese remastered version of Morrison's 1968 debut solo album has the best recorded sound I've heard since I last played my old vinyl version (bought, for the information of cognoscenti out there, in Douggie Knight's record library in Belfast's Botanic Avenue circa 1974). The sound of the 'standard' CD issue is harsh and not that pleasant to listen to. In this remastered version the sound is much improved and the level of instrumental detail is really striking. Quite why Warner Bros haven't seen fit to issue a remastered version of this classic recording in Europe and the USA is beyond me. This version also contains a useful booklet with song lyrics - although there are a few mistakes, viz in Madame George Van sings of Ford and Fitzroy (two streets in the University area of South Belfast) and not, as the booklet suggests, "Froid and Fitzroy". Similarly, in Cyprus Avenue Van sings "All the little girls rhyme something on their way back home from school" whereas the booklet miquotes this line as "I heard the little girl dropped something"! These minor quibbles aside, I cannot really recommend this CD highly enough - if you love this album you really owe it to yourself to buy this version, it may be around four times the price of the 'regular' version, but it is at least four times as good!

I was into Thin Lizzy at the time around the early 80s and was reading a Phil Lynott interview he commented ''People talk about classic albums and to me there is only one classic album and that is Astral Weeks '' I bought it the next day. I was then and still am Hooked by this album . Buy it have a couple of drinks and listen to it . I do mean listen sit down shut your eyes and drift off . Get back to me. you know .

I just needed to add my 5 stars to the collection. My first hearing of this was at uni with a crashing hangover. Staying over at a friend's flat. "What's that amazing music?" I thought. Must borrow it. Which I did. And that was it. A 40 year love affair with the best album of all time. I have played it thousands of times and I look forward to playing it thousands more. It is still as fresh and appealing to me with every playing. I still can't believe it was recorded in a couple of days by a group of people that hardly knew each other. It sounds like every note and phrasing has been hand picked and balanced a thousand times before being allowed to take its place. And I mean every note. Don't ask me what the words are all about though; I don't know. I am not sure that I even know what the words are. Maybe I should care - but I don't really. They just work - and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end - as does the music - every time you listen.

I bought my first copy in 1974, and thirty odd years later it still astonishes, intrigues, and makes me smile and yell out loud at the sheer musical perfection revealed in so many moments. A solitary pleasure - you wouldn't want some fool trying to talk to you during it - I find it's best enjoyed ever so slightly tiddly. Of the handful of records that at various times have really mattered in my life - Trout Mask, Grievous Angel, The Clash, Imperial Bedroom, Sign o' the Times, Life's Rich Pageant etc - this has mattered the most.

That Van only occasionally approached the heights he achieved here on the series of classic albums (give or take Band and Street Choir and Tupelo Honey) that followed, and never after the Fleece (you do call it 'the Fleece', don't you?), is irrelevant. You can't knock the man for failing to repeat sublimity, and more importantly it didn't sell well and a chap's got to eat. But if AW doesn't knock you dead, you might as well be dead already.