Keep It Simple (Bonus Track Version)

iTunes Review

As its title implies, Keep It Simple doesn’t attempt any grand statements. Van isn’t looking to a mystical muse to rescue his mix of country, folk, R&B, and blues. If the rhymes seem pedestrian and some of the arrangements like nightclub standards (brilliantly realized on the look-back-in-annoyance of “Don’t Go To Nightclubs Anymore”), that’s plenty fine with Morrison. In his forty-plus years of professional service, he’s learned not to force things and the title track spells it out: when faced with a complicated world, the best mode of attack is sometimes to sit out the scene. Not that Morrison’s gone horizontal here. He lays back with that perfectly timed lazy gait of his, where the song waits for him to pick it up. “Song of Home” shuffles while Morrison gazes at harbor lights. “That’s Entrainment” attempts to explain the hypnotic state that Morrison enters when the music hits his soul. But it’s the album’s seven-minute closer, “Behind the Ritual,” where he slurs it up over “drinking wine” that he comes closest to sailing into the mystic.