“If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream...” and so opens the poetic dream masterpiece, Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” It's one of those monuments to human emotion that has the power to carry the weight of your life with it. The funny thing is, I really wasn’t feeling Van for the longest time, always shelving him away in the “mom-rock” bin. Then all of a sudden something hit me and quickly snowballed into the realization of his genius. With Astral I find the strength lies in the fact that, although the production is both classical and traditional in instrumentation, the record comes across as highly psychedelic from the mysticism of the arrangements. It’s similar in that way to the first few Leonard Cohen records or Townes Van Zandt’s “Our Mother the Mountain,” And for being such a contender among quality poetic-psyche LP’s, it’s easily available and usually pretty cheap, so there's no reason why you can't check it out. –Alex
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