Ah, good old Leonard Cohen...he of the eerie voice over the eerie music which has complemented movies a-plenty such as "Natural Born Killers." Here are two offerings from master-poet, monotone genius Cohen, "Songs From A Room" and "Death Of A Ladies Man."
First, an Amazon.com user review of "Songs From A Room":
I once spent the whole of a night in Vancouver, B.C. filling a small apartment with balloons as a gift to the woman I lived with at the time. I imagined her delight at opening the door to find the rooms crowded with inconvenient color. But she didn't come home that night.
Leonard Cohen's Songs From A Room played continuously until the sun rose. It was a perfect Cohen moment: pathetic but also comical, lonely but not altogether lost, in turn full of bright buoyant images and pale, creeping light.
He likes his rooms more spartan, but he would have appreciated the irony: Cohen's heroes often balance on a knife edge between sacrifice and suspicion; ready to give it all up for love one moment, and caught in wry resignation the next.
Although overshadowed by its haunting predecessor, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room is probably my favorite of Leonard's albums. It is - unbelievably - more personal than the first. It seems to begin and end in resolute introspection. As Cohen fans may agree, one almost wonders after living with his songs for years whether Leonard wrote them and sang them for you, or whether you wrote them and gave them to him - so much do they become a magnetic North for our own emotional compasses. In Songs Leonard seems to explore every human relationship: that of lovers certainly ("Tonight Will Be Fine"), but also father and son ("Story of Isaac," "The Butcher"), patriot and country ("The Partisan," "The Old Revolution"), and ambiguous, erotic friendship ("Seems So Long Ago, Nancy").
In this album more than in any other, one of Cohen's most consistent themes repeats: that of the revolutionary. Specifically, how revolutionaries embody an awkward convergence of the saintly, the solitary, and the social. As the heroine in "Joan of Arc" (Songs of Love and Hate, 1971) declares,"..."I'm tired of the war,/I want the kind of work I had before,/a wedding dress or something white..." Like Joan, these heroes are often betrayed by the forces they fight for, and they tend to disillusionment. "I fought in the old revolution/," sings the narrator of "The Old Revolution", "on the side of the ghost and the King./Of course I was very young/and I thought that we were winning/I can't pretend I still feel very much like singing/as they carry the bodies away." To what does the song refer? The Vietnam War? Rock and Roll? It doesn't matter. We know what it feels like.
Love is a revolutionary act. It may overturn countries, or it may not. But it does overturn us.
The sixties saw the appearance of a phenomenon called the "singer-songwriter." We were told that in the best of their work, popular singers were writing and singing poetry. Only a bare handful - among them Paul Simon and Bob Dylan - were legitimate contenders. Leonard Cohen, despite the self-consciousness of his early work, will join Dylan as the best of these. Stack any line of Yeats against this from "The Stranger Song:" "And while he talks his dreams to sleep/you notice there's a highway/that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder..." (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968). The image in its compactness chills.
In "The Butcher" the protagonist comes upon a man slaughtering a lamb only to recognize that the butcher is his father. We are always at the mercy of what we love, Cohen seems to say. And betrayal is just around the corner when we dare to love - whether it is a country or a woman. But in the end, however pointless the exercise seems - like a roomful of balloons - we sometimes find ourselves surrounded by beauty. I recall that when Jennifer Warnes put out Famous Blue Raincoat, a compilation of Cohen's songs, the master himself seemed astonished that in her mouth his songs were so "beautiful." They are beautiful, Leonard. They're just not pretty.
http://rapidshare.de/files/7424313/Leonard_Cohen-Songs_From_A_Room.zipAnd now a RollingStone.com review of "Death Of A Ladies' Man":
When I first met Leonard Cohen, he was telling a good friend of mine that his mother was seriously ill. My friend, whose father had recently died, was so moved by Cohen's mesmerizing familial compassion that she quietly began to cry. Seeing this, Cohen jumped up, left the room and quickly returned with his famous blue raincoat. "Please cry on this," he said. "It soaks up the tears." And you wonder why I like Leonard Cohen.
Unfortunately, the tales surrounding Cohen's seventh album, Death of a Ladies' Man, produced by the once-famous but lately infamous Phil Spector, are neither poetic nor kind, and the LP probably has fewer admirers than buyers. Cohen himself, though he feels the songs are unusually strong, has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the record. Spector, it seems, simply took what the singer felt were tapes still in progress, kept them under lock and key, mixed them like a solitary mad genius and released the album without bothering to consult with his artist. Not everyone likes a surprise, but Cohen has both dealt out and dealt with enough superromantic irony in his lifetime to walk through it as if it were a fine spring rain.
With such a history, it's fitting that Death of a Ladies' Man more than lives up to its notoriety. It's either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and I'm betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world's most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world's most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving. To me, both men would seem to belong to that select club of lone-wolf poets, Cohen haunted by new skin and old ceremonies and Spector by the reverse. While the latter apparently begs to differ with most of the contemporary world, the former has been known to defer to amatory begging to gain all the experience he possibly can from the sisterly sea around us. Both these guys know what fame and longing are.
But it's silly to take sides about this LP because so much of it is first-rate. Contrary to popular opinion, Leonard Cohen's lyrics, arguably the best in rock & roll, are easily decipherable through the calliopean claustrophobia of Phil Spector's sometimes-padded wall of sound. Actually, except for the very minor "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" (a rather pointless wallow in raunch) and "Fingerprints" (wrongheaded country music), Spector displays a good deal of sensitivity toward a type of material (chansons, for want of a better word) with which he's never worked. Though his rock & roll hits were often delicate and deliberate mixtures of the simple and the grandiose, it was usually the music that was grandiose, not the words. With Cohen, everything's the other way around.
A self-taught singer, Leonard Cohen can get by with six strings and a homemade melody if he has to, but his words are so moody and complex you can't tell up from down, implosion from explosion. Yet Spector's melodies, arrangements and production generally swim rather than sink, and though he provides an unusually dense aural fog (some thirty musicians and seventeen backup singers) for Cohen's inner storms, no one gets run over here because of lack of vision. (Who knows, "Death of a Ladies' Man" might turn up someday on an album of Phil Spector's greatest hits.)
While Spector's contributions to Death of a Ladies' Man are anything but lethal ("Memories" is an effective doo-wop nightmare), Cohen's are still the kiss to build the dream on—if you can get to sleep at all after hearing "Iodine" and "Paper-Thin Hotel." The latter is one of his double-edged, liberation-and-revenge songs about infidelity and a cheated lover's claim of lack of jealousy ("A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I learned that love was out of my control"). Then, as the vocal begins to turn murderous ("I felt so good I couldn't feel a thing"), you realize the lover hasn't been telling the truth. Then you realize he has been. It's like thinking back to the beginning of one's great failed romance or thinking ahead toward the inevitable finish of what is now sublime: after a while, you don't want to, but what else is there? ("What happened to you, lover?" someone asks the singer on "I Left a Woman Waiting." "What happened to my eyes/Happened to your beauty," he answers. "What happened to your beauty/Happened to me.")
"Death of a Ladies' Man," one of Cohen's finest songs, is a seriocomic marvel that leaves you either anticipating great adventure or wondering if you've just had it. A man and a woman fall in love, and eventually the more realistic woman completely trashes the poor, romantic man, taking everything, including his sexual identity. ("The last time that I saw him/He was trying hard to get/A woman's education/But he's not a woman yet.") The song's incredible last verse manages to be terrifying, funny and philosophically awesome, all at the same time. It's about life and love and could serve as an epitaph for most of us sharing this planet:
So the great affair is over
But whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant
And so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far.
—By Phil Spector and Leonard Cohen. ?? 1977, Stranger Music, Inc. Back to Mono Music Inc. (RS 258)
http://rapidshare.de/files/7424407/Leonard_Cohen-Death_Of_A_Ladies_Man.zip
