My Top 20 Albums from 1978 No 10

Wavelength 6½ ( 1978, UK pos 27 )
Kingdom Hall / Checkin' It Out / Natalia / Venice U.S.A. / Lifetimes / Wavelength / Santa Fe/Beautiful Obsession / Hungry for Your Love / Take It Where You Find It
A voice as beautiful as ever, but we've a few sounds almost MOR contempory to the day in which this album was released. The music is fairly uninteresting then? Well, yes. Still, his magnificent voice remains. Not that the lyrics are particularly interesting either, but the cumulative effect of good and bad errs just the right side of bad to send the enjoyment levels to be had from listening to 'Wavelength' to be better than average. What?? Deep draw of breath from reviewer! Ooh, groovy little bits of guitar work through the catchy title song, check it out! Hand-claps, seventies keyboards, a solid rhythm section. On paper, absolutely nothing wrong with the musical performance. A good track, but not a magical or special track. It ends up a nice thing to listen to, but not something you would ever seek out to listen to, if that makes any sense at all? I'm damning the album with faint praise? Well yes, actually. 'Lifetimes', like the title song, like nearly every song here, is extremely easy to listen to. Nothing at all unpleasent, but surely nothing to compare to the mans finest works? Even a different kind of artist/song-writer, Leonard Cohen? Well, he'd make several god-awful albums in the late seventies, but at least they were interestingly bad. Van makes an album that is neither good or bad, but somewhere inbetween in a state that long-term fans will find easy to enjoy, but surely won't place on the turntable in preference over Van's earlier works?

We've a couple of extended tracks here, a couple of those eight/nine minute long tracks that Van usually does so well. The first on this album is 'Venice USA', a track with a slightly awkward vague reggae feel, a song that seems not to go anywhere at all, seriously. Several seaside, low rent resort sounds enter the fray. It's not entirely pleasant. The closing song, 'Take It Where You Find It' you would hope would be something special, with its carefully prepared and delicate musical track, with its impassioned vocal and fairly mysterious lyrics. And, indeed it is something fairly special, yet I hate the plodding rhythm section and the sound of the music and production, and the overly slick little session muso guitar fills. Yet, it remains a reasonably, damn it with faint praise, impressive track. Much like the album as a whole. An album whereby it seems almost petty to pick faults with it, yet when comparing it directly to the mans finest works, or indeed any quality singer/songwriters finest works, comes up slightly lacking in places.

Rollling Stone
Who has not been waiting for the next great Van Morrison LP? Whether you thought his last masterpiece was Veedon Fleece or Tupelo Honey or even (what I think) Moondance, you certainly were never prepared to write him off. Nobody's going to write him off because of Wavelength either, but it's obviously not the album he is still destined to make.

Something comes clear here. Ever since Moondance, Van Morrison has staked his claim to the rare title "poet," mostly on the basis of what amounts to a bunch of autumn leaves. Look at those records lying there-Tupelo Honey, Hard Nose the Highway-the best as good as the worst, and all of 'em slowly turning brown. You wanta kick 'em just like a pile of crumbly leaves? Well, go ahead and do it. And kick Van Morrison too. Because he's a saint. Yeah, that's exactly why he needs the boot.

Morrison's got a beautiful obsession with something he can't quite state, and we've got a beautiful obsession with Morrison. Which is fine for him, but what are we to do? We are to sing the chorus, that's what:

Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah

At least that's what it says on the lyric sheet.

And make no mistake, we're supposed to notice the lyric sheet-the only other Morrison LP that had one was Hard Nose the Highway, itself a rather pointed statement regarding leaves and such. "Such": that's what Van Morrison's interested in-roamin' in the gloamin' and divers other top-hat autumnal falderal. Linden Arden stole the highlights, but where did he take them? Way back home, that's where. Leaving us with another album of furry-nosed nuzzlings in the fleece. But about this time, one begins to wonder: nowadays does this artist ever come bearing anything other than said fleece? Naught.

Wavelength is a very nice record. I'm sure all the people at Warner Bros. are pleased with it. Ditto the DJs. It probably would also be really groovy for somebody's idea of a wine-and-joints, Renaissance-fair garden party. It makes a lovely sound, breaks no rules and keeps its grimy snout (or, rather, that of its maker) out of the dark places that mainstreams step correctly over. Rigid. The singer has a nifty little band here, what with Bobby Tench, Peter Bardens from the original Them and even great googamoogah Garth Hudson sittin' in on various instruments. Well, take me back to Orpheus Descending!

Because it's obvious that Morrison ain't playing out no dramas here. Nor has he been for some long while now. Perhaps he is more interested in apprehending the exact configuration of an ace of sunlight and presenting it to us. A lost or stolen moment in time, when meaning went rollin' by like the trains on the tracks, like the breeze through a door. But the question is: DO WE CARE? Obviously the man is possessed, obviously he is driven to seek some definition in the most mundane curbstone air, certainly he is a mystic whose light shines for he and thee and all of us, but he flat-out refuses to say anything but the patently obvious and then calls that poetry-which it is.

So maybe we should knight Van Morrison poet-errant of the New Drowse. Meaning, don't ever ask him what his beautiful obsession is actually about. Because if you do, he'll come out with embarrassing sludge like:

Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it.

No, obviously we're far better off with a solid wall of dum derra dum dum diddies. Which actually makes just as good sense as anything else being dished up these days. Still, though, it do confound how such a monumental talent can mire himself in such twaddle, fine as some of it may be.

There is a kind of resolute silliness about a lot of the stuff Van Morrison's been doing for the last few years: he wants to make records for cookouts, we keep probing for his bardic soul, and the whole mess is ridiculous because he was actually only specific for one very tight stretch there, enclosing "T. B. Sheets" and Astral Weeks. As for the rest-i.e., the main body of his work-he truly delights in the glancing perception and all the filigree in the world. (But what kind of perverted universe reigns-and what kind of bray-orbed, Fellini-trite monstrolas might issue forth-when filigree becomes the body?) What, finally, are his beloved, infinitely extensive out-choruses but filigree? The last half of "Madame George" may be the all-time tightrope act, but, on Wavelength, he really gets down to it and dubs the endless out-choruses of "Santa Fe" a whole new song.

So I guess he has finally achieved what he maybe set out to do in the first place: make the edge the center. The result, unfortunately, is a perfect bubble of smoked cheese. It'll do for the party, but it leaves certain sorta primal questions so far from resolved that-well, no, we never quite give up, do we? It is damn well roundabout known that Van Morrison records about four times as much music as he releases. Some of these great, edgy, eternity-shale, sax-bitten pieces leak out occasionally, and that's just fine. We're gonna deserve something beautiful to listen to in our old age.
From The Archives Issue 679: April 7, 1994

Featured Songs: Kingdom Hall and Wavelength