Album Reviews : 1/2 Van Morrison, “Days Like This,” Polydor.

Van the Man has committed a cardinal sin for an artist of his stature--he’s become predictable. Little here distinguishes itself from the blues-jazz-rock hybrids of his last dozen or so albums. And where he used to transform the mundane into magic, these musings are merely, well, mundane. No epiphanies, no revelations, no point. New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).