Search - Van Morrison :: Pay the Devil (W/Dvd) (Dlx)

Great collection - live music is thebest part of it

Hakim | San Francisco, CA, USA | 06/01/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"this album was released in two separate versions - one at the beginning of the year as a cd only, then one in the fall after one or more concerts that morrison did 'live at the ryman' in nashville. reason? the later version includes a second disk - a dvd of five of the songs done at the ryman.



he covers webb pierce, hank williams, curly williams, leon payne, and rodney crowell, among others - fiften tracks. wow! and he owns 'there stands the glass - he' turned the pierce song from a radio lament into a real scenario...



i only hope that morrison will release a full album of the live ryman recordings, since the studio stuff (while good) seems stiff and almost lifeless compared to his work live... it just does not hold a candle to the cuts from nashville.



if you are gonna buy this album, then i recommend that you spend the few extra bucks and buy the second version.



a side note - i discovered the 'live at the ryman' material via youtube... there were three videos put up earlier in 2008. i thopugh tthe, 'wow, what a clever guy morrison is - putting up a few cuts to get people to buy the album.' i mean, that is what mtv is all about, right? but having the cuts on demand seemed like such a great marketing idea.



i bought the album right away [luckily reading carefully to find the 'plus-dvd' version]. i sent the links to friends, who then bought the album. i got people interested who hadn't listened to the man in years, and he sold a few albums through my viewing that video.



but it turns out that he is not as clever as i had given him credit for being. one night, intending to show the youtube video to a friend, i found a notice that morrison and exile music had put a halt to the playing of the videos - and so cut off a potential source of audience enhancement. i said, 'fooey.'



but it's still a damn good album!"

Drinking album

Andrew B. Noselli | New Milford, NJ | 01/17/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"They have this album on the jukebox at the Dog House in Washington Township NJ and it sounds really good there. Several of the sonbgs of Pay The Devil make you want to take a seat at the bar and order two Southern Comforts and two Cherry Cokes. Van Morrison proves here that he cam teach Nashville a thing or two about what country music should sound like in this new century. No schmaltz, vocals should be straightfoward and belched out with aplomb. Some people think Van is a little bit of a hermit; this album shows you just how wrong these people are. Van Morrison shows us instead that he is conscious of his mystic canon of work and we may as well live at a truck stop if we really expect him to re-produce the mythos of his 80s albums onstage."