The synth-heavy production on 1988’s I’m Your Man has always been divisive – even Leonard Cohen’s longtime collaborator Anjani Thomas subsequently expressed misgivings – but on its opening track, it really works. The Pet Shop Boys-ish arrangement chafes against Cohen’s growling vocal, amplifying First We Take Manhattan’s shiver-inducing sense of brooding menace. Seven years – and a personal financial crisis – after 2004’s half-hearted Dear Heather, Cohen returned to the studio with his powers freshly marshalled.
As if to underline the point, Old Ideas opened with the sharply witty Going Home, on which Cohen’s muse addresses the listener directly, disparaging the artist himself as “a lazy bastard in a suit”. Cohen famously called his 1977 LP Death of a Ladies’ Man “a catastrophe”, which perhaps reflected more on its drug- and booze-soaked recording with dangerously erratic producer Phil Spector than the finished album. It’s an outlier in Cohen’s catalogue, but one with much to commend it.
Certainly, he maintained an understandable fondness for the rock’n’roll-influenced Memories, often performing it live. Cohen’s renaissance continued apace on Popular Problems. Released the day before his 80th birthday, it sounded suspiciously like a masterpiece.
Almost Like the Blues found him reflecting sorrowfully on man’s inhumanity to man – not merely torture, killing and war, but “all my bad reviews” – and staring down his own mortality, replete with a jab at Richard Dawkins. Shruggingly titled, largely recorded in collaborator Sharon Robinson’s garage and packaged in a sleeve featuring a selfie, Ten New Songs was an understated return to recording after Cohen’s five years of Buddhist study. But beneath its unassuming veneer lurked beautiful songs: the chanson-like A Thousand Kisses Deep is an exquisite reflection on regret and time’s passing.
Nowhere else on this album does the cocktail of Cohen’s songwriting and Spector’s more-is-more approach to production gel so perfectly: the title track is a fantastic song. Moreover, the weight of Spector’s arrangement, the way it causes the tempo to drag, seems to complement rather than suffocate its mood. Other artists have made albums that looked imminent death in the face – Warren Zevon’s The Wind, Queen’s Innuendo – but You Want It Darker, released less than three weeks before the end of Cohen’s life, may be the most poised and affecting.
In which a brief tryst with Janis Joplin – “We fell into each other’s arms through a process of elimination,” he later recalled – turns into a kind of eulogy, not just for the late singer, but for the era in which they met. It’s haunted by the sense of optimism extinguished. Rock stars of a certain vintage were wont to write despairing state-of-the-world addresses in the late 80s – Lou Reed’s New York is full of them – but Everybody Knows is a cut above, its relentlessly bleak worldview leavened by black humour: “Everybody’s got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died.” Against stiff competition, Songs of Love and Hate may be Cohen’s darkest album.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
