Leonard Cohen
Ten New Songs

THE REVIEW

Simply, ten new songs. The album is austere, starting from the title. Mystical and austere. The lyrics are poetry like only Lenny knows how. Poetry sometimes tinged with loneliness, sometimes abandonment, sometimes disenchantment, sometimes tenderness. The music might be a bit too "synth," not always reaching the (dizzying) heights of the lyrics. Certainly, it lacks the pounding force of tracks like "Everybody Knows" or the whirlwind of a "Democracy". But Lenny is Lenny, and even with this album, he hypnotizes you, enchants you, and sometimes makes you feel, with his words, a bitter aftertaste that you also see reflected in the everyday, behind an episode, in a smile not given.

And so it starts, from the everyday, with "In My Secret Life". A track about the mask we all wear every day, about the eternal dualism between being and appearing. "I Saw you this morning/you were moving so fast". Thus enters, dark and deep, Lenny's voice. In the world, everything is a race. Yet this music makes us understand that we must find time to reflect, or perhaps just to be less alone. "But I'm always alone..." and it’s a stab to the heart. It continues with another great track, "A Thousand Kisses Deep". A piece about the abysses of the soul, those reached only "with the depth of a thousand kisses". A very sad text, slightly sweetened by the vocal doubling of Sharon Robinson. The mood lightens (at least musically) with "That Don't Make It Junk" and its slide guitar. Another enormous track, with significant insight: "I don’t trust my inner feelings/inner feelings come and go". Reflect, people, reflect. Yet we do not treasure the precept, and in the next, "Here It Is", we take an uppercut right in the face. Perhaps it’s Lenny's most tragic song (Here is your cross/Your nails and your hill...) but it also has an extraordinary echo of "The Future" (that "love is the only engine of survival") when the voice digs into these words "And here is the love/That it’s all built upon".

"Love Itself" is a song about love that was and now is no more. A universal theme that we all, alas, glimpse at one point or another in life, like that "dust in the backlight" mentioned in the text. "By The Rivers Dark" is ultra-distilled DOC mysticism, where among the dark rivers of Babylon we find ourselves deprived of heart, wedding ring, and the spirit's will to live. But it is only the prelude to the most touching track of the album, that "Alexandra Leaving", entirely in duet with Robinson, which requires procuring abundant tissues to dry the big tears: it is the farewell of the beloved. Heard a thousand times, and a thousand times with a shiver always different. And it seems each time you hear it, those lips "that wake you with a kiss". The album closes with three more enormous tracks, "You Have Loved Enough", "Boogie Street", and "The Land Of Plenty".

Ten new songs, simply. By Lenny, though.