He has tried everything from cosmic consciousness to earthy R&B - but this is Van Morrison's first country album. And he sounds enlivened, even happy, nestling among the steel guitar and bottomless suffering.

Morrison soaks up the inebriated heartbreak of Webb Pierce's There Stands the Glass and snarls his way through Your Cheatin' Heart, more tormentor than victim. The three self-penned songs - The Playhouse, This Has Got to Stop and the title track - fit snugly beside the Nashville classics and obscurities. But his style is a little too brutal for country's tender touch. Half as Much, made famous by Patsy Cline, is whipped into a jaunty homage, all subtlety sacrificed to showing off.

In Don't Make Me High, when he sings: "Don't feel my leg, 'cos if you feel my leg, you'll want to feel my thigh," even terminally grumpy Morrison has to laugh.