“I was educated by the school of hard knocks,” sings Van Morrison a mere six minutes into his 32nd studio album. To anyone familiar with the leafy Belfast boulevards bordering what a recent biography described as the “secular, quasi-liberal” environs of Orangefield Boys School, the opening line of School of Hard Knocks may come as something of a revelation.

But then, so what if Violet Morrison's cossetted only child is gilding the biographical lily? Lately, Morrison's work has suffered from the reverse problem - a say-what-you-see procession of R&B dirges concerning, variously, the music industry, fame and critics. He's been shooting the messenger for so long now that it's a wonder he can get beyond the front door for all the bodies piled up outside it.

Criticisms from outside can be ignored, less so the ones from within. And the air of musical and spiritual decluttering on Keep It Simple - not least the rhapsodic title track - suggests that even Morrison himself was willing to change the record. It starts with a pared-back blues called How Can a Poor Boy, which sounds OK at first, and then - once you realise that it's a prelude to later, greater heights - somehow doubles in your affections.

We're not talking Astral Weeks or Veedon Fleece-style flights of fancy here. At this point it would be insane to expect such sonic off-roading. Nonetheless, songs such as Soul and Entrainment reveal an engaged Morrison allowing his phrasing to flourish in the space vacated by his horn section. It would be better still if he felt brave enough to rest the backing singers occasionally - especially on the nondescript No Thing - but Morrison's insistence that he produce all his records precludes any possibility of an album that lays him bare in the same way that Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond.

That said, Keep It Simple is a better Van Morrison album than anyone had a right to expect - not least on its closing song. Fanning out from a rimshot-riding mandolin phrase, Behind the Ritual returns to a theme that has informed his best songs from Into the Mystic and on. When he's on that sort of form, he could sing “blah blah blah” for 16 bars and still suspend your entire sense of self. No idle conjecture, this. That's exactly what he does. And that's exactly what happens.

(Exile/Polydor)

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