Astral Weeks - Reception

Reception

Astral Weeks received critical acclaim soon after being released, but it was not a best selling album with the general public, even though Rolling Stone named it album of the year and Melody Maker called it "one of the strongest albums of the year". Steve Turner relates how it was "one of the essential albums for travellers on the 'hippie trail' from Europe through to Kathmandu and there were even reports of vans painted in psychedelic colours being renamed 'the Van Morrison'." A year later with the release of Moondance, Warner Bros. ran full-page advertisements with the note: "It may be a little tough to find 1969's Astral Weeks in some record stores. Damn shame. It wasn't adopted by the Pepsi set and ended up as what you might call a critically acclaimed but obscure album... If you want it and can't find it, yell at the store's record buyer. Loud, because you're the customer and you're always right. Undo the veils of potential obscurity."

In 1979, Lester Bangs wrote in an essay, published in the book Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, "Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three—years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend."

In a 2004 review, Sean O'Hagan with The Observer described the album as: "Ultimately unreadable, utterly singular, it remains one of those rare albums that actually lives up to the extravagant claims made on its behalf." In another article about Astral Weeks in November 2008, O'Hagan wrote that "Its singularity lies, as Costello points out, in its vaulting ambition. It is neither folk nor jazz nor blues, though there are traces of all three in the music and in Morrison's raw and emotionally charged singing. There are no solos save for the ethereal flute and soprano saxophone improvisations that are woven through the last, and shortest, song, 'Slim Slow Slider', the album's elegiac coda. Throughout, there are interludes of breathtaking beauty when the music surges and subsides, rises and falls, around Morrison's voice."

Alan Light of CNNTime magazine wrote in 2006 that "Morrison sings of lost love, death and nostalgia for childhood in the Celtic soul that would become his signature." Light asserted that "Astral Weeks didn't reach the charts, but its mystic poetry, spacious grooves, and romantic incantations still resonate in ways no other music can." The Rolling Stone reviewer wrote that the album was "soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians". Again noting the album's rare hypnotic effects, Allmusic's review describes its "unique musical power". Joe Levy remarks: "Astral Weeks is about a different way of organizing thought, a different way of organizing music. It's otherworldly." Popmatters noted: "Because everything came together and then somehow disappeared, one could argue Astral Weeks came to life much like John Milton’s exhortation at the beginning of “Paradise Lost”: through the muse’s effervescent mists."

Music critic Greil Marcus said that Martin Scorsese told him, in 1978, that the first fifteen minutes of his movie Taxi Driver was based on Astral Weeks. In an NPR review, Marcus, who says he has listened to the Astral Weeks record more than any other, comments about it: "You can hear these moments of invention and gasping for air, and you reach your hand and close your fist and when you open your fist there's a butterfly in it. There was really something there, but you couldn't have seen it. You couldn't have known."

Glen Hansard of The Frames says that he was captivated by the feeling of freedom when he first heard the album. Hansard says: "It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage, and up to that, what I thought made music great was practice and study...This album says there's more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply, with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined." Niall Stokes of Hot Press praised the album upon its being voted as best Irish album of all time in 2009: “Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is a worthy poll-topper. It’s an extraordinary work, packed with marvelously evocative songs that are rooted in Belfast but which deliver a powerful and lasting universal poetic resonance. Astral Weeks has consistently appeared in polls of the Greatest Albums of All Time, in the US, the UK and all over the world – so it has been widely recognized as a really important work of art." The album's producer Lewis Merenstein said in 2009: "To this day it gives me pain to hear it. Pain is the wrong word—I'm so moved by it."

In December 2010, writing in Tablet Magazine, Lieb Liebovitz called the album "one of very few albums I know that possess the quality of redemption." He explained that: "No matter what afflictions you, the listener, might bring into the experience, no matter how much woe or heartache or ennui or sweet melancholy, Morrison’s howls—and the swirling musical notes that accompany them—will purge you of your sadness."