Leonard Cohen
Death Of A Ladies' Man

THE REVIEW

...the release of "Death of a Ladies' Man" caused turmoil among Cohen's fans, unanimously considered his worst album, however, hidden within the folds of its sounds, is the musical future from the mid-eighties to today...

Every great artist has a black sheep among their albums that they disown. Leonard Cohen, more than thirty years after its release, considers "Death of a Ladies' Man" a half misstep. When it was released, Cohen's most devoted fans cried scandal listening to the famous wall of sound that the producer Phil Spector built around Cohen's songs. Those that until then were poems set to music only by Cohen's voice and guitar (in truth, the first hint of change had already appeared in the previous New Skin for the Old Ceremony), under Spector's care, became songs full of instruments, sounds, choruses, and counter-choruses that no one would have ever expected. What worked for groups like the Ronettes or Tina Turner was jarring in the presence of artists like Cohen, not to mention the half disasters that Spector made with "Let it Be" by the Beatles and later with "End of the Century" by the Ramones.
After four albums of great lyrical depth, built around the folk sound, Cohen felt the need to give a twist to his music but made the mistake of biting off more than he could chew, so that the change was so evident as to leave many perplexities and questions which, however, would find full meaning and answers a few years later, when this breaking album became a starting point for changes in subsequent albums.

The collaboration between Cohen and Spector led to the writing of twice as many songs as would end up on the album. Work that was eventually released in an unfinished manner, passing off vocal recordings that still needed a lot of work as complete, something that never sat well with Cohen. Spector surrounded the artist with an endless number of musicians, managing to get Bob Dylan and the beat poet Alan Ginsberg, collaborators at the time on Dylan's bestseller "Desire," to participate in the choruses of Don't Go Home with Your Hard-on.
The lyrics of this album speak of loves, lost, found, fleeting, which are a constant in Cohen's texts. "Like mist leaves no wound in the darkness of the hill, so my body leaves no wound on you and never will." So begins True Love Leaves No Traces, the first track of an album dedicated to love and failure in love (Iodine). Blinding love full of jealousy when the object of desire is near but unreachable (Paper-Thin Hotel), itchy and fleeting love, between the sacred and the profane of a student who at the school dance would give up his faith just to see his lover naked (Memories), now extinguished love that seeks a meeting point that no longer exists (I Left a Woman Waiting).

Songs perhaps too burdened by Spector's hand but that maintain the textual and stylistic peculiarity that made Cohen a composer, yes sophisticated, but capable of reaching the depth of the soul and offering his interpretation, bringing it to the surface and making it accessible even to those who find it elusive.
After only two years, Cohen recovered from the Spector binge with an album that musically wanted to return to simplicity like "Recent Songs".

It remains an experiment which, in light of future works, seems to be a progenitor from which to borrow new sonic solutions.