What's Wrong with This Picture?
Van Morrison

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Over the course of the past four decades, Van Morrison has cast himself as a hard-drinking brawler, an astral-projecting mystic, a smooth-as-silk jazzbo, and a Celtic shaman. What's Wrong with This Picture? is something of a smorgasbord of those elements, held together by the immutable force of Morrison's voice and his iconoclastic, instantly recognizable songwriting style.

The disc-opening title track may be the gentlest of Van's career, with his quizzically slurred vocal tones bundled up in a cloak of simple-yet-elegant strings and brass -- an ambience that takes a sharp turn on "Whinin' Boy Moan," a guttural blues that finds Morrison tapping into his darkest back pages. He stops to muse about the blues here and there -- most notably on a cover of "Saint James Infirmary" -- but the bulk of the disc is painted in brighter hues. On "Once in a Blue Moon," Morrison breathlessly chases, catches, and endeavors to hold on to a wisp of romance, his inimitable phrasing matched by vivid splashes of horns (supplied in part by legendary British jazz clarinetist Acker Bilk, who helps shape "Somerset," which he also co-wrote).

Morrison also gets in touch with his celebrated cerebral side on a brace of tracks, pondering the deep mysteries of Mother Earth on "Little Village," which chugs along stealthily on well-worn rails of supple rhythm. While not exactly a new chapter in the story of Van Morrison, What's Wrong with This Picture? is peppered with enough well-spun yarns to merit turning its pages again and again. David Sprague