Keep It Simple was ostensibly Van Morrison’s first album of all-new material since Back On Top, although he dabbles with the classics on “That’s Entrainment,” a pun on “That’s Entertainment” and “Don’t Go To Nightclubs No More,” which takes its melody from “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Pulling away from the Americana of Pay the Devil, Van mainly focuses on coming home, whether on the nostalgic “End of the Land” or the hymnal “Song of Home.” In many ways Keep It Simple feels like a retirement album, an epilogue to his career, so it makes sense that Van had the longest hiatus of his career to date after it was released, although that in turn would give way, amazingly, to the most profilic period in his discography.

Sonically, as the title suggests, Keep It Simple is much more of a back-to-basics rock album than anything else in Van’s 2000s catalogue. The production is sparser and more guitar-centric, and while “Don’t Go To Nightclubs No More” seems to signal a return to jazz, it quickly turns into another slow rocker. Van’s lower registers sound odd at times here, as if the high warbling of Pay the Devil has bent his voice temporarily out of shape, and he has to make a conscious effort to stoop down to those low notes, which imbues his delivery with a new grittiness, redolent of Bob Dylan’s work around this time.

Overall, exhaustion is the dominant note of the album. Van often sounds tired, and his cadence and rhythm is sometimes a little off, perhaps explaining why he foregrounded entrainment – the biomusicological synchronisation of organisms and music – as a concept in the buildup to its release. The track “That’s Entrainment” plays like an older, tireder version of “Days Like This,” much as “No Thing,” a kind of echo to Dylan’s “It’s All Good,” sees him reflecting that “I’m getting too tired to start all over again,” a stark contrast to the exuberant reworkings of his own “Start All Over Again” that pop up throughout his 2010s work.

Most of the other tracks are equally exhausted. Van sounds quite faltering on “Lover Come Back,” and while “Soul” has a beautiful melody, its lyrics are pretty skeletal, and in the end it only really feels like the draft of a song. Nevertheless, the album takes an evocative turn on its closing track, “Behind the Ritual.” Here, Van leaps back to the psychedelic style of his late 60s and early 70s output, allowing his voice to quieten and deepen until we’re in the trance state of Astral Weeks, which he would revive at the Hollywood Bowl the following year. From there, it would still be three more years before he tapped into a new flow, making Keep It Simple feel like an odd footnote to his career as it might have ended.