The story goes that it was Leonard Cohen’s son Adam who pressed his father for a back-to-basics album, one where the most magnificent mutter in rock could operate unhindered by Cohen Sr’s taste for flamenco guitar and synths. We may have something as banal as pester power to thank, then, for this exquisite 14th album from the Montreal poet, held by recent Nobel laureate Bob Dylan – gnomic as ever – to be “No 1” to his “zero”.
The facts are these: Cohen is 82 and – after having toured solidly for five-odd years, remaking the fortune he lost to a thieving former business manager – is winding down. These eight and a half songs (the ninth is a reprise) were demoed in Cohen’s home studio; they are most often simply structured and direct. Once Cohen Jr and returning collaborator Pat Leonard (1980s Madonna) had buffed them up, they remain sparsely arranged, and are all the more powerful for it.
A few soulful angels alight on On the Level; some arpeggiating guitar and keening violin sweeten the sadness of Traveling Light. Here are Jewish cantors and Celtic fiddles, but mostly, Cohen’s voice is front and centre: the parchedness of Methuselah often matched by a roué’s playfulness.
This is an album of killer couplets, even the bleakest delivered with a half-smile. Finality is a theme. “I’m leaving the table/I’m outta the game,” growls Cohen on Leaving the Table, as a hollow-bodied guitar prangs lonesomely. The song is actually about the end of a relationship (or many relationships); of the death of a ladies’ man. (“I don’t need a lover,” Cohen rattles, with weary irony, “the wretched beast is tame.”) But the hair stands up on your arms nonetheless at these repeated leave-takings. Cohen’s gimlet-eyed title track doesn’t mess about, either. “Hineni, hineni,” he sings in Hebrew; (“Here I am”) “I’m ready my Lord.” On Traveling Light: “it’s au revoir” – to a lover. As it happens, Cohen has back-pedalled in recent days, when the internet jumped to conclusions about the state of his health: there are more projects in the pipeline.
You Want It Darker could be addressed to fans pining for a return to Cohen’s bleakest songwriting; or a lover, or a higher power. As befits a lifelong spiritual seeker, born into a storied Jewish family, but well versed in scripture and Buddhism, the love songs have religious overtones, and the spiritual passages pack a lover’s passion. Treaty, for instance, seems to beg for a truce between warring lovers, but amid the rueful reminiscing is talk of water and wine, snakes and sin.
On the opposing side is It Seemed the Better Way, perhaps the most sombre song of all, one that tussles with approaches to faith. We did want it darker, it’s true, and Cohen has obliged. “It sounded like the truth/ But it’s not the truth today,” rasps Cohen, quite bitterly.
