Album reviews: Leonard Cohen, [et al.]
October 04, 2014 12:00AM
Leonard Cohen gets the funk up on his latest effort. Source: AFP
THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
LEONARD COHEN
Popular Problems (Sony)
****
OH LEONARD, you got funky. In a very Leonard way, of course, but listen to that slippery bass on the sublime Almost Like the Blues, which naturally enough isn’t quite a blues but is certainly the kind of song which invites you to shake your hip.
Then there’s the ominous Hammond organ and punchy brass on A Street. This is a similar sound to the one we’ve heard on his late-career world tours. A different band but that same sumptuous R & B pulse. And My Oh My, with its Memphis-style horns. It’s Cohen as if produced by Isaac Hayes.
He is moving into uncharted territory now. Painters have done great work at 80, classical composers, poets. But songwriters? Cohen, born in 1934 and an adult long before anyone coined the term singer-songwriter, is still with us, the spirit willing and the creative muscle as match-fit as ever. And after that period of messing around with those dinky Casio keyboard sounds in his records, the sound here, with producer and co-writer Patrick Leonard, is rich and warming, his verses honed to a razor-sharp edge.
It is wrong to say that Cohen’s career is all about the lyrics, he has always found interesting musical settings for his examinations of the human condition. But when you drink up those words, that’s when the music really catches fire.
As ever, there is a twinkle in the eye, the sly R & B groove of Slow, which spins off his preference in music and love: “I like to take my time/All your turns are tight/Let me catch my breath/I thought we had all night.’’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLcV ... VegcCcMNS4
Elsewhere, it’s those old pains of the heart, songs of love, desire, remorse and even hope, often presented with the imagery of war, apocalypse, the Old Testament.
He’s been at this since the release of his first album, at 34, in 1968. And there are still very few working in music who can match his lyrics for clarity, for economy, for precision, for grace.
Almost Like the Blues begins: “I saw some people starving/There was murder, there was rape/Their villages were burning/They were trying to escape …’’
He might be talking to an old lover in A Street, or to a nation, and either way the best of times have passed. Nevermind begins with a metronomic beat, introduces Papa Was a Rolling Stone-like strings, female vocals singing from a Middle Eastern scale, with Cohen delivering a tale as old as humanity itself, concluding “My woman’s here/My children’s too/Their graves are safe/From the likes of you.’’
Born in Chains is somewhere between hymn and Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman; Samson in New Orleans could be written by someone abandoned in that city, abandoned by their faith, abandoned by their country.
And Did I Ever Love You will certainly be the most tender letter to an old lover you will hear this year, as Cohen observes: “The lemon trees blossom/The almond trees wither/Was I ever someone/Who could love you forever?’’
At 34, at 50, 60, 80, do you think the human heart is ever over that?
You can try to pretend otherwise. Leonard’s here to tell you it’s not so.
He’s telling us what all the great ones do. We are not alone.
Noel Mengel