Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Scott Floman | (A) |
| PopMatters | (not rated) |
| Rolling Stone (1975) | (not rated) |
| Rolling Stone (2008) | |
| Stylus Magazine (2007) | (not rated) |
Generally, critics initially reacted by underrating or ignoring the album altogether, as it represented a significant departure from Morrison's more familiar R&B and soul genres. Both Rolling Stone and Melody Maker printed dismissive reviews with Melody Maker commenting that the first side of the album featured "some of his least memorable shots at songwriting since Tupelo Honey". Rolling Stone called the entire album "self-indulgent ... mood music for mature hippies." However, the current Rolling Stone biography of Morrison hails the album as "the culmination of everything Van was doing up to that point, all celtic mystic tumult in the vocals and pastoral beauty in the music" and ranks it among "his most majestic music".
Allmusic critics, Jason Ankenny and Thom Jurek called the album "brilliant" and commented that "With its elegiac tone and deeply autobiographical lyrics, this was a Morrison who didn't so readily associate himself with the feel-good, peace, love, and rhythm & blues sound American audiences were used to. If any album reflects a real period of transition for an artist, it's this one."
Scott Floman states in his review: "Veedon Fleece is one of the most ambitious albums ever made and one of the greatest: inexhaustible, eclectic, inspiring, beautifully performed, intellectually challenging, it remains the pinnacle of Morrison's art."
Derek Miller of Stylus Magazine concludes: "Veedon is the kind of album, so frothy and thick, that requires silence when it's over. You have to turn the stereo off for a while. To me that's the better explanation for Morrison's three year absence. He'd just finished Veedon Fleece."
John Kennedy, PopMatters critic wrote in 2004:
Veedon Fleece is a poet's album, a jazz lover's album, a masterpiece of soul-singing, a blue and green journey into the places of the heart that were first opened up for dowsing with Astral Weeks. Baudelaire said, "we can call 'beautiful' only that which suggests the existence of an ideal order; supra-terrestrial, harmonious and logical that yet bears within itself, like the brand of an original sin, the drop of poison, the rogue element of incoherence, the grain of sand that will foul up the entire system." This album contains all of Baudelaire's definition of beauty.The album was featured as Mojo Magazine's Disc of the Day in February 2008 and referred to as "Van Morrison's mystical 1974 masterpiece".
Read more about this topic: Veedon Fleece
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