Back on Top

After a few stylistic divergences wherein he tackled jazz standards and the Mose Allison songbook, Morrison returns to solid R&B/pop with BACK ON TOP. His first album for Virgin's blues imprint Pointblank finds him back on the track of albums like THE HEALING GAME, but is curiously (for an album on a blues label) devoid of blues tunes. The notable exception is the up-tempo blues shuffle "Come Down Geneva" that opens the album and finds Van musing about, among other things, the historical relevance of obscure rockabilly singer Vince Taylor.

Much of the rest of BACK ON TOP finds Morrison in a more pastoral, reflective mode, reveling in the natural wonders of the world around him without venturing into the spacey mysticism of his '80s albums. As is the case on several of Van's '90s albums, there's a song detailing the pitfalls of being a cog in the music business wheel; "New Biography" finds the notoriously private singer casting aspersions on the sources contacted for a book about his life. It wouldn't be classic Van if there weren't a little crankiness mixed in with the splendor.