“Lift Me Up, Consume My Darkness” - Van Morrison :: “Beautiful Vision”
Van Morrison’s spiritual salvation in heritage and matured magic can be heard from any momentary mountaintop, tentative tomb, or timeless tower of hopeful heights with magnum opus titles such as “Astral Weeks”, “Moondance” and the 12-string seance of “Saint Dominic’s Preview”. But like a lot of our heroes and legends of language, Morrison entered the following decade with a grace and serenity that is most achieved in extraordinary excellence with his 1982 masterpiece, “Beautiful Vision”. From the vulnerable vaults of New Age commentary on cosmic consciousness and the fashionable fever dream of cultural connection, comes the enlightening reflection via the prism of a perplexed personality in all its greatness. A miraculous moment in music that has cast perhaps the most sincerely sensitive and soothing document in the musician’s career since that of the early days, Morrison contemplates his muse in the most realistic context, leaving listeners with vivid visions of the longitude and latitude of life’s complex relationship with content and cosmic inquiry.
With a reflective return to the celebration of his Celtic roots and the musical murals of his memories in Belfast that proposed an entirely different background for the now middle-aged musician, “Beautiful Vision” stands as this concrete calling in Morrison’s career as he effortlessly explores the many moods of his muse and the formative teachings of trailblazer of the New Age, Alice Bailey. With elements of geographical grandeur, personal trials and life’s new beginnings taking place in the volume-less void of space and time, Morrison quickly gained control of the album’s production with his iconic eagerness and set his soulful sights on doing what he does best, performing live in front of a audience.
While the album expresses Morrison’s fabulous familiarity with rhythm, texture and all-out jam, it also takes a lead into the somewhat unfamiliar by specifically sounding out the shrouds of romance, existentialism and the sometimes fierce finances of faith and spirituality that isn’t like any of his previous works on such subjects. With tracks like the album’s retrospective opener “Celtic Ray”, “Aryan Mist”, Morrison’s near autobiographical hit “Cleaning Windows” and the gorgeous serenity and divinity of “Dweller on the Threshold” all bringing together this otherworldly wave crashing collection of music, making this without a doubt one of Morrison’s greatest and most fascinating achievements in his long, prolific career.
