Leonard Cohen

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Folk Album of the 70s

Review Score:

(10/10)
If I was forced to take only one folk cd from the 70s with me to some deserted corner of the universe this would be the one ( sorry Nick Drake fans). If you are a fan of the fushion of lyric with song, Cohen ( like Dylan in the 60's) is your man. And it's not just the combination of primitive backround beats melding with oddly unique, often self-deprecating comical arrangements, but his use of metaphor is so highly polished as make the poet in all of us stand up and shout "bravo!"

Cohen is at his best telling the intimate story of two tortured people meandering through a flurry of passions: infuriating anger and desperation, tenderness and erotic pleasure, all linked to the irony of a self-relaized, sometimes self-deprecating humor as in "Is This What You Wanted," "Chelsea Hotel #2" ( co-starring Janis Joplin), "There is a War," and "Leaving Greensleeves." These are songs chock-full of the some of the most remarkable metaphors anywhere in music. They can be read on many many levels, and this is the kind of lyric the soul loves the best. It gets right to the complexity and contradictions of the emotions in all of us. Yep. Right up to its smelly little source.

Cohen keeps this same tap flowing in other ballads as well: "Who by Fire" with is comical metaphors to the numberless ways to die, to "Lover, Lover, Lover," a tender song really, a desperate anthem to the power of love over the carnage it can leave behind.

Then there is this other Cohen...the "dirty little boy" in Field Commander Cohen" and the remarkable "A Singer Must Die." All attempts to tame or control this wild revolutionary son, either by the creeds of society or relationship, is doomed to abject failure. Cohen, swallowed whole by the insight to cut through all that nonsense, and armed with an insistent sense of poetic truth, is, as always, unrepentent.

Then there is this sweeter Cohen; "I Tried to Leave You," and the superlative "Take This Longing," reveals two very different tender events...one revolving around a tired long term relationship where love is the only thing left ( a real juxtaposition of most common day love songs is which love is the only thing NOT left), and the other centered on a realization of what a man ( or woman for that matter) wants to experience over and over again in the beauty of a lover's body and soul. "Take This Longing" is one of the most tender ballads ever penned.

Cohen is not for everyone. Some of us just simply don't have the depth or experience to know the places he has revealed. But if you allow him, Cohen takes the young lyricist or poet to a place that is a clinic for good writing, and the rest of us just to the clinic of the soul, unfettered by shallowness or the stock "literalism" of the emotions that phychologists like James Hillman say prevent us from developing our souls. Cohen in "New Skin" takes us into some very dark "unliteral" places so that we all may find a "New Skin" for our souls out of the chaos of shattered and conflicting emotions in which love and intelligence brings us to new realizations.

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