Album Review - Leonard Cohen

Album reviews by ACID

Artist: LEONARD COHEN
Album: Old Ideas
Label: Columbia/Sony Music

HAVING been a longtime fan of the Canadian singer-songwriter-poet-famous Buddhist Leonard Cohen, I look forward to his work with a measure of anticipation. Cohen’s biggest strength, it is often successfully argued, is his version of the written word.

Right off the bad, the material in Old Ideas, while it almost seems to project different nuances of Cohen through the different phases of his creative career, is not a let-down. This album is also his first in seven years. Growled, whispered, spoken and sung in intervals in that scratchy, decadent baritone, the songs are about the subject he knows the best – himself. This is apparent from the beginning itself in the first track Going Home, when he starts off with “I love to speak to Leonard / He’s a sportsman and a shepherd”, all wryness, quiet and grim wit.

Present in the album, too, are familiar tools – mildly repetitive lines (which are always deliberate), found in Going Home and Amen (which sounds like that other paean Hallelujah). Darkness is a sultry ode to pure temptation, cunningly put in an organ-and-Southern blues-hook combination. Banjo, is another one of those unexpected pleasures, and you know that outright when you find yourself tapping your feet to lines like “It’s a broken banjo bobbing / on the dark infested sea”.

Whether he is sly, humorous, despairing, intimate, the songs seem to present a deeply personal side to Cohen’s life and work. And considering how he continues to fascinate critics and fellow musicians, it is wholly justified.

Anyone listening for that pleasant hook and arresting vocal ability will never truly find that in any Cohen album – he maintains that gritty and gaunt edge and slips effortlessly into the stance of the poetic, haunted, emotionally resonant troubadour. At the grand old age of 78, the one who brought classics like Song of Bernadette, Famous Blue Raincoat and Marianne still shines through the medium he knows so intimately and so well.

A real treat, this, and one worth listening to again and again.