Send "Leonard Cohen " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Independent |
 "The Darkness" is brutally frank, Cohen opening with the assessment, "I've got no future, I know my days are few," before digging even deeper: "I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too". With organ and subdued slide guitar shadowing his acoustic guitar, it has the weathered, implacable tone of a late-period Dylan confrontation with the inevitable, though it's far from the bitterest piece here. That honour goes to "Amen", which starts out like a straightforward love song, with the recurrent refrain "Tell me that you love me, amen" crooned over an arrangement in which wry banjo, poignant viola and organ are joined by some of Cohen's trademark cooing angels. But as it proceeds, the insistent demands to "tell me again" grow darker, and his tongue sharper, to the point where he's singing of "the filth of the butcher" being "washed in the blood of the lamb", hardly the most romantic of sentiments for an intimate evening. "Tell me again when the victims are singing, and the laws of remorse are restored," groans Cohen, and it becomes clear that these are the Old Ideas to which he's referring: the forgotten verities of ethical certainty, love and human fellowship abandoned en route to our quick-fix, instant-gratification future.The higher concerns are continued in "Come Healing", whose hymnal tone reflects a desire for both physical and spiritual healing: "Come healing of the reason, come healing of the heart". It's an obvious heir of sorts to "Hallelujah", although given that that song was as much about waning potency as anything, a more apt successor may be "Show Me The Place", a heartfelt plea for the restoration of desire: "Show me the place I've forgotten I don't know". Likewise, in "Crazy to Love You", Cohen admits to the wearisome duty of love: "I'm tired of chasing desire, I'm saved by a blessed fatigue."...full text |
| Guardian |
| If long-term music fandom teaches you anything, it is that the value of your investments can go down as well as up. Your idols can develop feet of clay and ears of cloth. And then there's idols like Leonard Cohen. The Montreal poet found an acoustic guitar thrust into his hand in the mid-Sixties, the better to prostitute his art via the medium of pop. It is not wild hyperbole to say that he might be the finest master of his craft alive today, with a body of work on the human condition told in riddles and coated in tar. "Hallelujah" is one of his that has, itself, been prostituted widely. Even Cohen's latterday works (Ten New Songs, Dear Heather) maintain a high pleasure-to-piffle ratio. In our hero, we also have an ordained Buddhist who would have sat out his twilight years up a mountain, smiling down upon our worldly foibles were it not for the fact that a former confidant made off with his pension pot . He is 77 – not the sort of age when a monk can easily give up non-violence. So the sage has swapped robes for natty suits, come down off the mountain, toured the world for two years, sired a grandchild, and made one more album for the road. "I've got no future, I know my days are few," he rumbles cretaceously on "The Darkness", the album's pre-release taster. "I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too." The guitar parts and piano are just as exquisite as the lyrics. "Going Home" opens Old Ideas with a self-deprecating address setting the album's tone: dark, with twinkles; an implacable higher power just offstage....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| Google “Leonard” and Mr. Cohen’s name will rank only below that of Mr. Nimoy’s for top search results. Not entirely shocking considering the amount of time Trekkies spend online. He earned this cultural clout not by pandering to the masses, or even heavy-hitting producers like John Simon or Phil Spector (who once threatened him with a crossbow when he objected to his “wall of sound” techniques). Throughout his legendary career, fraught with an eroding undercurrent of paralyzing depression, myriad romances and an outstanding equity of wisdom, he’s managed to sound the same without it ever getting old. In a recent New York Times interview, Cohen addresses every writers’ nemesis — deadlines. “You’ve got a deadline. Well, I do too: death. It tends to insert itself into our considerations,” he said with a wry smile. Legacy is an onus that must be dealt with. This album may not have even existed, along with his last two years of touring, if five million dollars of his retirement fund didn’t vanish into thin air back in 2005. Eight years after the smooth jazz schmaltz of Dear Heather, these old ideas still resonate with the timbre of a man who attributes his hollow baritone to smoking cessation. With a withered tambourine shifting in the background to hold the beat punctuated by a homophonous mix of warbled strings and female chorus Cohen muses “I’d love to speak with Leonard/He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.” Talk about self-deprecating sagacious humor. “Going Home” is black humor with no sugar or cream. It’s a meta-commentary on his whole artistic being. Towards the bridge we get an idea of the serenity he yearns for once he can separate his humanity from the Leonard we all adore. “Going home without my burden/Going home behind the curtain/Going home without this costume that I wore.”...full text |
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