Van Morrison – Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 (2021) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

The veteran bluesman loudly wakes up the sheeple with this boring and paranoid double album, reminiscent of a dinner party with a bitter divorcee

Even a man as implacably opposed to lockdown as Van Morrison – who spent 2020 releasing songs rubbishing science as “crooked facts”, mocking people for wearing masks and describing the government as “fascist bullies” while also invoking the Berlin Wall – might be forced to concede it had its advantages. After all, it gave him the time to write the material for Latest Record Project Volume 1, a 28-song, two-hour-plus opus that allows him to set out his latterday worldview more fully than any previous work.

Morrison’s longstanding sense of distrust – the result of some dubious contracts he signed in the 1960s – long ago calcified into a weltanschauung in which everyone was lying, with the exception of a certain Northern Irish singer. He’s sounded like a conspiracy theorist before – on 2005’s They Sold Me Out, he averred that being “sold out for a few shekels” was “the oldest story that’s ever been told”; “brainwashed the suckers again and perpetrated the myth,” he sang on 2008’s School of Hard Knocks, “propaganda far and wide” – but on Latest Record Project Volume 1, the sheeple are truly awoken.

Tracklist:

01. Latest Record Project
02. Where Have All the Rebels Gone
03. Psychoanalysts’ Ball
04. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
05. Tried to Do the Right Thing
06. The Long Con
07. Thank God for the Blues
08. Big Lie
09. A Few Bars Early
10. It Hurts Me Too
11. Only a Song
12. Diabolic Pressure
13. Deadbeat Saturday Night
14. Blue Funk
15. Double Agent
16. Double Bind
17. Love Should Come with a Warning
18. Breaking The Spell
19. Up County Down
20. Duper’s Delight
21. My Time After a While
22. He’s Not the Kingpin
23. Mistaken Identity
24. Stop Bitching, Do Something
25. Western Man
26. They Own the Media
27. Why Are You on Facebook?
28. Jealousy