Van Morrison left the longest hiatus in his career to date between Keep It Simple and Born to Sing: No Plan B but he would make up for it with the most prolific decade of his career to date over the 2010s, with three albums released in 2017 alone. As the title of this 2012 album suggests, this ushers in a new phase in his career too, one in which he is singing to sing, aiming for flow and momentum above all else, not unlike the latter-day buoyancy of Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour. With that admission front and centre, Van is immediately much more limber and confident in his groove here than on Keep It Simple, the closest he’s come to a genuine epilogue or coda album.

The fact that Van recorded this album in Belfast probably has a bit to do with that groove. Whereas Keep It Simple was suffused with weary songs of home, here Van has actually come home, and the experience seems to have energised him. Even the title of the album is playful, especially in contrast to the back-to-basics austerity of Keep It Simple, and the opening track emphasises this newfound and expansive sense of fun. Titled “Open the Door (To Your Heart)” its perky horns and lush jazzy textures invite the listener to fall in love with Van all over again but this time primarily as a classicist and a band member rather than an original or innovator.

Ironically, that paves the way for one of the absolute highlights of his late career – the second track, “Going Down to Monte Carlo,” a sublime eight minute number that sees Van heading for a mid-century world of glamour, luxury and ennui. Towards the end of Keep It Simple you could gear him straining towards longform tracks once again, and that classic flow and cadence is back on track here – grouchiness tempered by his wry sense of self-deprecation (at one point he complains about smooth jazz only for the horns to peak in the background) and some quintessential Van turns of phrase (“Sartre said that hell is other people/I believe that most of them are.”)

Indeed, so loungey and intimate is the album that it could almost be a live recording – and this nexus between studio and live renditions will crop up time and again in Van’s 2010s output. The silky, sinuous textures work evocatively alongside Van’s ageing voice, cloaking them with mellifluous textures in ways that recall Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin. There’s a lovely gentle resilience to it all that seems to mark the start of a quite distinct period in Van’s career, not least because of his own willingness to get lost in the music, with several of the tracks clocking in around eight minutes.

The front cover only enhances this sense of experiencing a live album, as does the production. Despite the title, Van is quite content to simply be one part of an ensemble, notable on “Close Enough for Jazz,” which continues to be largely an instrumental number at this point, although it would become a touchstone of his 2010s albums and accrue more vocal power and presence. One of the signatures of the album are long subliminal fade-outs to almost nothing – this is one of the reasons why some of the tracks are so long – as Van winds down to a hushed voice and single bass or piano line, emphasising the breathless sense of a small live venue.

These gorgeous jazz textures feel unusually continuous with Van’s voice, whether he’s imitating a brass solo, or the brass section is quietening down until it becomes all breath. Drawing on the plaintive high notes of Play the Devil, Van’s voice converges with the brass section into an exquisite sweetness that’s really infectious. Yet the smooth jazz always contains a slight edge of self-parody, a wink at the audience, a tacit acknowledgment that while this may not be the experimental or visionary or self-serious Van they once knew, he’s doing just fine.

Yet just as smoothness will go on to be a feature of the fourth phase of Van’s career, the final track, “Educating Archie,” is also a harbinger of things to come. Van has been grouchy for a long time but there’s a different iteration of paranoia here, as his gripes expand beyond the music industry to the entire world system and he starts to accuse his audience directly rather than his nebulous foes of yore: “Waffle is the language that they taught you/Taught you to talk/But you can’t even get any angle/’Cause you forgot to keep on walking the walk.” Interestingly, this is both the most anodyne track on the album and a rare instance of Van swearing, and so it anticipates the bitterly bland edges of his COVID-era work, albeit distantly enough that the more mellifluous jadedness of “Goin’ Down to Monte Carlo” is stll the dominant note.