Leonard Cohen could order a breakfast burrito and his particular choice of words would impart more truth and profundity than most songwriters manage in their entire careers.
You Want It Darker is the Canadian singer’s 14th studio album and, as you’d expect from an 82-year-old who has spent most of his life ruminating on mortality, death is a preoccupation.
The title track broods with the minor hum of Avalanche — string arrangements by Cohen’s son Adam, shimmering choir from the Shaar Hasomayim Synagogue — as Cohen’s now sub-atomic voice sings: “If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame”.
The “you” he has always addressed in his songs is finally God, perhaps his listeners too?
Treaty (his loveliest melody for a while) sees self-redemption as all but impossible (“I heard the snake was baffled by his sin / He shed his scales to find the snake within”) while Steer Your Way is a bleak assessment of mankind’s spiritual predicament.
But there’s always that sparkle. “I was fighting with temptation / But I didn’t want to win / A man like me don’t like to see / Temptation caving in.”
If I Didn’t Have Your Love will become a lovers’ standard, and if Leaving the Table is effectively goodbye, the only response can be, don’t go.
(Sony)
