Astral Weeks

Eight tracks in about forty-seven minutes, and the subtractive test meets the record at an angle, because its method is repetition. Morrison circles a phrase until it turns, and the circling is the subject: memory returning to one place. Cut the repeated close of “Cyprus Avenue” or the long farewell of “Madame George” and those songs lose their arrival; they resist. The test finds give elsewhere. “The Way Young Lovers Do” is a brassy jazz waltz in another register from everything around it and could leave with little loss. “Ballerina” runs past what its material asks, “Beside You” is loose in the middle, and “Slim Slow Slider” stops rather than concludes. Four strong necessities against three or four places of give hold the figure, the record’s second lowest.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: in a young man desire and memory are one motion, and the place a life began, a few named streets, is where it keeps trying to be reborn. The title track asks “to be born again”, and the record shows the asking. “Cyprus Avenue” discloses adolescent longing as paralysis, a boy in a car who cannot reach the girl he sees. “Madame George” goes deepest: an older figure of uncertain gender, seen by a boy at a party in half-light, with tenderness and without judgment, then left behind on a train. The breaking voice, stammer and cry, is credited as disclosure too. It is held below the bar because much of the record is mood more than meaning, and what it states rests on three songs.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Height is frequent, and its kind is transport. The title track rises from guitar and bass into the voice’s first long ascent, and the strings lift it further. “Sweet Thing” is joy at near full height, the voice running ahead of the band. The close of “Cyprus Avenue”, the band slowing, the voice dropping out and returning, is a summit. “Madame George” builds for nearly ten minutes into its repeated farewell, the record’s highest point, and “Ballerina” rises once, late. Seven of eight tracks rise, and full height is reached four times. It is held from the top because the elevation is of one colour, ecstatic longing without terror or grandeur, and because two tracks swing or wander without rising. It stands level with Kind of Blue on frequency, a tenth below on purity.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The record is built on one archetypal frame, and the frame is printed on it: side one is “In the Beginning”, side two “Afterwards”. Side one is a genesis, a longing for rebirth that opens on the title track’s call and passes through the garden of “Sweet Thing” to the boy on Cyprus Avenue. Side two is the after-life of that innocence: the party, the departure, the dancer, the dying. The particular stays particular, Fitzroy Avenue, Cyprus Avenue, a train, a named figure, and Madame George becomes more than a person: a figure at the threshold between childhood and the world, loved and left. What holds the axis below the bar is that the frame is carried by the side titles and the sequence more than built through every song, and around it the mythic is evoked rather than load-bearing.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The turn is from the rock and rhythm-and-blues record of 1968, and from the singer’s own hit, to something without precedent in its field: a rock singer leading a jazz rhythm section through long takes, with no electric guitar and no chorus in most songs, the voice treating words as sound and repeating them until they change. Its models lie nearer modal jazz and the folk ballad than any rock album of its year. The stake was real. Morrison came out of a contract dispute with a hit-single career behind him, placed his first record for a new label on a form no audience had asked for, and the record failed commercially for years. It is held from the top because the means were jazz’s and folk’s, already proven, and others were moving in a near direction at the same time.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The songs are made to be circled: a few chords, a bass line answering the voice phrase by phrase, a voice free to repeat, stammer and extend. That form is memory returning to a place, and a three-minute song with a chorus could not say it. The sequence is counted here, once: two sides of near-equal length, genesis and aftermath, with the long songs set as pillars (the title track opening, “Cyprus Avenue” closing side one, “Madame George” at the centre of side two) and the bare “Slim Slow Slider” to end. What holds the axis down: strings added afterwards by another hand sometimes sweeten rather than serve, “The Way Young Lovers Do” breaks the form, and edits and fades made after the takes fixed part of the shape.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and fifty-eight years of it. Critics have returned to the record in every decade since its failure: Lester Bangs’s long essay on it is among the most cited pieces of rock criticism, Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 (2018) reopened its context, and the major critical polls of albums have placed it high. Morrison performed it whole in 2008, forty years on, and that return reopened what the songs are. The depth is semantic and formal at once: the words remain open to reading, and the interplay of Richard Davis’s bass with the voice yields on each return. It is held below the top because the re-examination is narrower than that given to Kind of Blue, which musicians study as a grammar.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the rock and singer-songwriter album of 1968 and the years after. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock singer could make an album as a long improvised meditation with jazz players, setting words as incantation inside an open form, and that the result could hold the deepest material of a life. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record founded no school, and no practice can be shown to have turned on it at once. Its reach came late and runs through individuals: the open-form songs of later singer-songwriters, Morrison’s own later work, and the idea that a rock album may be a single ecstatic utterance. Much of it is the reach of a touchstone, cited more than followed. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and that holds the figure below the bar.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years: form first, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, remastered and reissued. Presence has grown: a record that sold poorly in 1968 is now heard whole, placed high in every count of the century’s albums, and was performed whole by its maker forty years on. That presence is wider among critics and musicians than among the public, and the songs are known through the album more than through broadcast, which holds it from the top of its row. The fabric carries little date: acoustic instruments, no period drum or guitar sound, only the strings marking the late sixties. It stands two tenths below Kind of Blue, which has lasted longer and is heard more widely.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing at the centre. Richard Davis’s bass is the record’s second voice, answering and anticipating Morrison phrase by phrase, and it carries the form. Morrison’s singing is command of a rare kind: the voice moves from croon to stammer to cry, bends words, and places its repetitions so that they build. Jay Berliner’s guitar, John Payne’s flute on “Sweet Thing” and “Beside You”, and Connie Kay’s light time are all placed with restraint. The faults fall across the record: Larry Fallon’s overdubbed strings are sometimes conventional and sit apart from the band, the mix is rough in places, “The Way Young Lovers Do” is a stock arrangement, and two tracks end on fades. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Kind of Blue at 9.3, which command the medium throughout.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: acoustic, unhurried time; a voice that circles and repeats until the phrase changes; memory and desire set in a few named places. The two most distant elements are “Sweet Thing”, all joy, the garden seen, and “Slim Slow Slider”, bare and dying, the voice and the soprano saxophone almost alone. They obey the same law, the same voice, the same circling, the same acoustic room, and the second answers the first as afterwards answers the beginning. The range is real: rapture, adolescent paralysis, tenderness, farewell, illness, from guitar and bass to strings. The one breach is “The Way Young Lovers Do”, whose brass and swing belong to another record. Narrowness is not the issue: the range is wider than the record’s name for a single mood.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held deeply: memory, desire and the ecstatic state. Love and sexuality are held, from the adolescent crush to the lovers’ walk. Childhood and the city are held together: Belfast’s streets, the avenue, the railway, a party in a house. The sacred is present as longing, rebirth asked for, not as faith. Gender and the marginal are held in “Madame George”, the one order the record sees from outside the speaker, and illness and death enter at the end. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state and history do not appear, though the record comes from Belfast on the eve of the Troubles. A forty-seven-minute record of one consciousness holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.3 / 10