Leonard Cohen

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Poetry in motion

Review Score:

(10/10)
New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a masterpiece, and one of Leonard Cohen's best albums. It's a truly great effort, and too often overlooked. Although his first three albums - particularly the first and third - are all certified masterpieces, this one, his fourth, was his first attempt to move beyond them in scope. Incorporating background vocalists and a wider array of instrumentation than he employed on those sparse first three efforts, Cohen creates here an album broader, more epic in scope than its predecessors. He also began, for the first time, to lighten up on the subject matter of his lyrics: incorporating some - albeit rather dark - humor into several of the songs here, Cohen creates an album - which, along with its broader musical pallette - that is a much easier listen this his first three, which were at times so depressing as to lend themselves to the status of "mood" albums. That said, Cohen is Cohen, and his themes remain the same; he has a lighter touch here at times, is all. Although the opening track, Is This What You Wanted?, features lyrics like "You were K.Y. Jelly/I was Vaseline" much of the rest of the album is pervaded with a deep and dark sense of self-loathing: Cohen places himself on a pedastal and de-construcs his persona as he did on "Avalanche", but in a much less abstract, far more direct and disturbing way. Cohen at this time was going through a period of extreme personal depression and writer's block (which would culminate in the Phil Spector collaboration on Death of A Ladies' Man), and songs such as Field Commander Cohen and A Singer Must Die attest to his state of mind at the time. A deep, dark, driving masterpiece with just the right amount of light touch, New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a great album, and an essential purchase for any admirer of Leonard Cohen.

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