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This makes me feel better about never being able to stand Van Morrison.

Van Morrison: Latest Record Project Volume 1 review – depressing rants by tinfoil milliner | The Guardian

This tinfoil millinery is interspersed with a variety of more predictable and even more enervating rants. These precisely replicate the experience of going back to your parents’ for lunch and discovering that – oh Christ – they’ve also invited Brian, their embittered old bore of a neighbour, who, as usual, has a couple of drinks and starts holding forth over the chicken chasseur. Social media is for idiots and anyone on it should get a life (Why Are You on Facebook?); modern music is awful and it’s all made on computers (Where Have All the Rebels Gone?); most of these so-called doctors don’t know what they’re talking about (Psychoanalysts’ Ball); say what you like about him, but Nigel Farage is a man of his word (Double Bind). Your parents have invited Brian because he’s been on his own since the divorce, and, with a crushing inevitability, you hear a lot about that as well: the iniquities of the legal process (The Long Con), and the injustice of handing over money to an ex-wife “too lazy to work” (No Good Deed Goes Unpunished). It seems a miracle there aren’t songs called These New Speed Bumps Outside the Primary School Are a Disgrace, The People I Got In to Do My Patio Were a Couple of Bloody Cowboys, and Have You Seen The Repair Shop? It’s the Only Thing Worth Watching These Days.

It’s an album you listen to while metaphorically pushing food around your plate and biting your tongue: there’s no point in saying anything back to Brian, because you’ll get a response like Only a Song, effectively an indignant splutter of “I’m just having my say” set to music. But in truth, it’s not really what he says so much as how he says it. The tone isn’t anything as stirring or exciting as anger, just endless peevish discontent and sneering dismissal, the latter reaching a peak with Jealousy, on which Morrison announces that anyone who disagrees with him is envious of his nonpareil insight into the way things really are: “I’m not a slave to the system like you.”

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