Van’s maiden voyage on new label Polydor kicks off with the title track, where he carps endlessly about, well, being in exile for too long, just like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, amongst other Hibernian heavy hitters. He follows this with “Big Time Operators”, a litany of complaints against the music scene bigwigs that, evidently, talked shit about him, tried to have him busted for drugs, bugged his apartment, attempted to have him deported — the usual shuck and jive that forces an artist into hiding. Anyway, Van’s got a few things to say and a couple of axes to grind on Too Long In Exile, and that is a little bit of a bummer listen, but he lightens up a bit by the third track, a cover of “Lonely Avenue” and things do improve from there. There are some real highs on the artist’s twenty-second release, including a reimagined version of his earliest single, “Gloria” that includes John Lee Hooker and is well-worth the price of admission.