Review of Old Ideas in The Sunday Times (29/01/12)

[Born With The Gift Of A G]

Pop pick

Leonard Cohen — Old Ideas

His first studio album since 2004’s Dear Heather, Old Ideas is one of Cohen’s most absorbing works in ages — lyrically arresting and unflinching, and musically pared-down, for the most part mercifully dispensing with the synth-heavy soundscapes that bedevil some of his later oeuvre. “I love to speak with Leonard,” he begins, in his parched, lugubrious drawl, on the wonderfully wry opener, Going Home. “He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/ He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.” It is one of many tracks on which the 77-year-old looks unblinkingly at the burden of reputation and expectation, at mortality, virility, fidelity — and at the woes of wider society. He addresses the last most explicitly on the bleak Amen (“Tell me again when the victims are singing / And the laws of remorse are restored”); yet, as ever with Cohen, the line between the personal and the political is a thin one. He invites us to negotiate that line: “Show me the place I’ve forgotten I don’t know” may, on the surface, be a lyric about waning desire, but it is also of a piece with the album’s secondary themes. Cohen is confronting the passage of time and the commodification of society, and contemplating — still — his sometimes vexatious relationship with romance and sex. Yet to call Old Ideas merely an elegy or an inventory would be inaccurate. It is too full of humanity and humour to be that. DC