This criminally overlooked 1986 release can be easily read as the final chapter of a trilogy made up with Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. An older vintage of Van, but one still in brilliant voice, takes one more psychic journey through his Irish past in a song cycle so preoccupied with autumnal nostalgia that it can be nearly overwhelming to both performer and listener at once. On the lovely, unhurried opener “Got To Go Back”, he allows, “Don’t give me port or whiskey/ Don’t play anything sentimental/ It will make me cry”. For fifty gorgeous minutes, Van reckons and wrestles with his mortality, his spirituality, his triumphs and his roads not taken. The synth and sax heavy arrangements — derided at the time for being unacceptably sedate — now seem like a premonition of universally praised records by Destroyer and Bon Iver 25 years later. The takeaway: don’t sleep on Van. Just because you don’t understand what he’s doing, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know perfectly well.