As the title announces, Three Chords & the Truth is a back-to-basics album for Van Morrison. The phrase was coined by Harlan Howard to describe country music and while Van’s title track is (and is about) R&B, he does follow it with the sole country number on the album, so he clearly respects the lineage of the idea. Like so many of Van’s latter-day releases, this one brims with nostalgia, yearning for the past paired with a cantankerous sense that the world is just not as good as it used to be, especially where music is concerned.

However, Three Chords & the Truth is more (or less) than a mere back-to-basics album. It’s undercooked in the same way as Keep it Simple and, like that album, signals the end of a period in Van’s career. The session-styled releases of the late 2010s are starting to fade away now, as Van pares back his vision for manifesto songs – numbers that are about getting a message across, and in which songcraft is a bit of an afterthought. No surprise that his trademark grouchiness is starting to congeal into a more entrenched bitterness as well.

In that respect, “You Don’t Understand,” one of the longest tracks, is the clearest example of Van’s new sound. Despite clocking in at six minutes there’s barely a melody here, just a vague sequence of complaints. It’s like he’s returning to the stream of consciousness style of Astral Weeks but in a dramatically diminished form, turning all his psychic energy outwards at people who have (supposedly) done him wrong: “Trying to see through the Celtic mist/Does freedom of speech exist?/What free state is this?”

Van also feels a bit geriatric – and the next period in his career, the height of the pandemic, sees him sounding older than any releases before or since. You feel this impending exhaustion in some of the fade-outs on his album. In his heyday, atmospheric fadeouts were a Van signature. They were where some of the most experimental and memorable parts of his songs occurred. However, he’d largely moved away from them in his late 10s work, and here they just sound tired, as if he’s started to leave the studio before the band have finished (the fade-out for “In Search Of Grace” only occurs two-thirds of the way through the song).

More generally, Three Chords & The Truth just feels a bit uninspired. There are great tracks but they’re exceptions that prove the rule. I quite liked “Dark Night of the Soul,” since this is one of the few moments when Van really nails his psychedelic-hypnotic outro. Apart from that, “On Broadway” is the one song that genuinely elasticises. It’s a continuation of the contemplative Californian vistas that have percolated their way through his work ever since “Almost Independence Day”: “Down to North Beach/In the parks of the West/That’s the place I like to go/Like to go the best.”

The closing track, “Days Gone By,” is possibly the most interesting track on Three Chords & The Truth. As Van’s last missive before the most paranoid period of his career, it’s a surprisingly nuanced response to online life, interpolating “Auld Lang Syne” as a plea against the excesses of media outrage in the modern world. Van genuinely seems to be thinking through how free speech has changed, the move towards a new moralism, and the inability to learn from mistakes: “So many words I said, so long ago/Well, we were oh so young and foolish then/Hopefully we can make mistakes/And then we grow.”

The track is all the more interesting and compelling in that Van’s next two albums are fundamentally bad-faith gestures, aimed at his divorce and at COVID restrictions respectively. Here, though, we see him in an unusually good-faith train of thought, as he calls for forgiveness from younger generations, acknowledgment of the struggles of older generations, and a broader and more generous sense of the complexity of any one historical moment: “There is no easy way out, my friend/You got to get used to it somehow/Everything you got in your life/Right up ‘til now/Somebody had to fight for it…”

With “Auld Lang Syne” gradually coming to the fore in the closing minutes, this is also Van’s farewell to the 2010s as his most prolific decade. The shift from that register to the bad-faith approach of the next two albums is troubling, disturbing and melancholy. Obviously, Van has always been grouchy and there are external factors at play here. But as a track that is about the difficulty of making good-faith gestures amidst the heightened scrutiny of a digital world, “Days Gone By” turns out to be prescient, almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, the snarky reception from critics seemingly sending Van deep into his own paranoid fantasies until he emerges renewed on 2023’s Moving on Skiffle.