Van Morrison goes tin-foil hat in new album

little, in an extremely qualified way, calling it ‘‘a risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection which, in its bonkers way, brings Morrison’s tumultuous career full circle.’’

‘‘To be a genius is not the same as being a sophisticated political thinker, as we keep learning again and again, to the point of exhaustion,’’ Elizabeth Nelson writes for Pitchfork.

‘‘In his press materials for the LP, Van hilariously valorises himself as the only living protest singer, by which it appears he means he is the only gazillionaire rock star to be a pandemic denier besides Eric Clapton.’’

Noting that Morrison has gone conspiratorial in the past, The Guardian proclaims that ‘‘on Latest Record Project Volume 1, the sheeple are truly awoken.’’ ‘‘It’s MI5 this and mind-control that, secret ‘meetings in the forest,’ mainstream media lies and Kool-aid being drunk by the gallon,’’ The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis writes.

‘‘On Western Man, there’s some troubling alt-right-y stuff about how the West’s ‘rewards’ have been ‘stolen by foreigners unknown’ and we should be ‘prepared to fight’. And he’s convinced that the shadowy forces of the establishment are engaged in efforts to silence him.’’ Worst of all, Petridis says, ‘‘the tone isn’t anything as stirring or exciting as anger, just endless peevish discontent and sneering dismissal’’.

Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Bernstein says: ‘‘Morrison’s repetition sounds less like the trancelike mysticism of a Caledonia poet and more like a furious customer demanding a refund.’’ He does laud the song Duper’s Delight, saying it ‘‘shows Morrison at his best: letting his audience in on his own profound process of self-inquiry.’’

Bernstein sums up the album as ‘‘a sometimes amusing, sometimes frustrating, sparsely thrilling, and largely unlistenable collection of rants and riffs’’. And about They Own the Media? While the song doesn’t explicitly name Jewish people as its ‘‘They’’, it does elevate an anti-semitic trope that has recently been revived in an even more malicious form by Qanon followers.

Sample lyrics: ‘‘They control the narrative, they perpetuate the myth / Keep on telling you lies, tell you ignorance is bliss / Believe it all and you’ll never get the truth / Never get wise, wise through their lies.’’

‘‘Well,’’ tweeted British writerpresenter Matthew Sweet, ‘‘the new Van Morrison album will certainly satisfy anyone who’s wondered what the Protocols would sound like with a sax accompaniment’’. – LA Times