Longtime Van Morrison fans may prefer the Belfast bard's tougher, emphatically R&B-driven work, yet it's his lusher, mid-'80s output that helped him consolidate the scrappy gains made in the prior decades. The once-heightened polarity between the earthy and the ethereal seemed muted on albums that traded in a softer-focus, romantic mysticism mirrored by the expanded scale of Morrison's band and arrangements, and left room for him to dabble in instrumental compositions or his renewed love of sax and piano.
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