Leonard CohenYou Want It Darker
Sony

- Leonard Cohen’s return from penury and obscurity has been a testament to the man’s considerable talent. Despite encroaching age and some frankly unusual musical choices, his voice, leathery and haggard, has been the more moving for its wreck and ruin, rasping the poetry of his twilight years. However it appears even this golden swansong must come to an end.

I’m not at all convinced that I did want it darker, when it’s Cohen we’re talking about, but there’s a funereal quality to his new record that delivers exactly that. You get it, quite theatrically, in the album’s title track, which has been doing the rounds as a single. In it Cohen remonstrates with a god that’s looming all too near. “If you are the dealer, let me out of the game / If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame / If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame / You want it darker.” It’s god himself that is dragging down the dark pall and it is ‘him’self here: the great and unforgiving father figure. When Cohen says “I’m ready lord”, it’s a resigned yet still defiant gesture. The word “Hineni” is repeated and then moaned soulfully: it’s Hebrew for ‘Here I am”. This is a very personal confrontation with God and mortality.

That’s already a pretty unsettling sentiment, but Cohen, at eighty-two years of age, is fixated on it. The obsession with death and the beyond is not just to be found elsewhere, but everywhere. The following number, Treaty, is Cohen again turning to the heavens, looking for an impossible rapprochement with God. “I'm angry and I'm tired all the time / I wish there was a treaty / I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.” There’s an interesting wrinkle in the narrative though: one you’ll notice as the lyrics seem to slip away from God and turn to some unnamed lover. I’m not exactly sure who that would be, as far as I know Cohen isn’t involved with anyone, but that’s probably the point. Whoever he’s talking to when he says “We sold ourselves for love but now we're free /  I'm so sorry for that ghost I made you be / Only one of us was real and that was me” they’re just as distant as God.

He teases it out on the shuffle-rocking On The Level, where the love he abandoned isn’t only God but the other guy too. “When I walked away from you / I turned my back on the devil / Turned my back on the angel too.” Cohen has his own personal trinity there and the conversation returns to them almost as often as it does to death.

You Want It Darker could almost be the music at a funeral. Quiet Hammond organ and ooh-ah backing singers accompany Leonard’s broken voice, like he was some relative of the family, invited to raggedly pay tribute to the departed. Cohen’s musical accompaniments remain as outsider as ever - though the palette has expanded in recent years. You can hear acoustic guitar strumming, as if it were the Leonard Cohen of old. There’s also some string playing, which -perhaps this is small-minded of me- seems to dovetail with Cohen’s references to his Jewish faith across the record. The strings account for some of the album’s most beautiful moments: see especially the final reprise of Treaty, which is heartbreaking.

It’s quite unusual to hear an artist exploring their own mortality in such a real and meaningful way. Few musicians are still performing at this point in their lives and if they are, fewer are the record companies that would release their work. Cohen’s words are as compelling as ever, even as they return insistently to a theme that’s so wrenching. I’m not thin-skinned but I find You Want It Darker quite difficult to behold. It’s the deeply personal record of someone confronting life’s most uncomfortable yet universal truth. It’s Leonard’s journey. I feel like a distant relative at the funeral, standing around uncomfortably, in a cheap suit.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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