Description
Van Morrison’s 37th album is a thorough exploration of the blues. It’s crisp, precise, and reveals his ability to inhabit classic songs while paying respect to their form. Roll with the Punches is a narrow portrait of Morrison, a chiaroscuro, Morrison surfacing in fragments through heavy shadows. There’s little sense of trajectory or transport, no string sections drawing golden light through the open space in his songs, where the coincidences of the physical world can be individual portals to the celestial. It’s crisp and precise. Morrison inhabits the songs, he delights in singing them, but he also respects them, living inside of their structures without disturbing them or re-envisioning them so that they extend elastically around him. All in all a fantastic record.
