No Guru, Method, Teacher

Long-time Van Morrison fans may prefer the Belfast bard's tougher, emphatically R&B-driven work, yet it's his lusher, mid-1980s output that helped him consolidate the scrappy gains made in the prior decades. The once-heightened polarity between the earthy and the ethereal seemed muted on albums that traded in a softer-focus, romantic mysticism mirrored by the expanded scale of Morrison's band and arrangements, and left room for him to dabble in instrumental compositions or his renewed love of sax and piano. No Method, No Guru, No Teacher proves among the more durable, convincing chapters in this era, carrying a now-familiar array of symbolic touchstones (the Celtic legacy of "Tir Na Nog" or an extended instrumental allusion to a hymn set to William Blake's musings on England) and offering two of Morrison's better meditations on redemption, "In the Garden" and "A Town Called Paradise", which echoes the fevered waltz-time trance of "Astral Weeks" itself.