Songs of Love and Hate

Review Summary: A VERY POWERFUL ALBUM

Review:

SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE is a very important album by Leonard Cohen, featuring genius songs as FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT, LAST YEAR'S MAN, AVALANCHE, JOAN OF ARC and DRESS REHEARSAL RAG, an essential CD for anyone seriously into GREAT music.

Review Summary: More hate than love but magnificent

Review:

This is my first Cohen album and it really is magnificent.

Cohen was 36 when it was released and the album has the feeling of an artist who fears his best days may be behind him. This is especially obvious in the lyrics of Last Years Man and Diamonds in the Mine. His voice in almost every song sounds world weary, bitter and angry. It leaves us with one of the best albums I've ever heard.

It takes a number of listens for the beautiful imagery and deep lyrics to lodge themselves in your brain and start to haunt you. Not to mention the beautiful music and arrangements.

It is also a very personal album. It is almost frightening to think that the events described in "Famous Blue Raincoat" actually happened. Cohen certainly sings it like they did.

I find myself unable to tire of listening to this masterpiece. Do yourself a favour and get it.

Review Summary: Bruised And Naked Cohen

Review:

This is definitive stuff, make no mistake. Dense, dark, full of self-loathing, at times almost impenetrable, it always draws parallels in my mind to those blurry, dank portraits that Francis Bacon conjured out of the depths of his psyche, in order - to paraphrase his words on the subject - "to capture the essence of the soul as if it had left behind slime-trails on the canvas." The album cover bares enough clues as to what was going on inside Cohen's mind at the time. He looks uncharacteristically scruffy, half-starved, manic and mystical, with his name and the title spelled out in stark, bold white letters against the harsh, black backdrop. Released in 1971, stung to the core by the death of free-love and sixties idealism, it didn't contain much inside the groove to exactly cheer anyone up, but as a document of where the artist's head was at at the time it is unparalleled. Nearly forty years on, we now know it is a leviathen of raw, primal music and imagery as ever plumbed the depths of popular song, akin perhaps to the 'John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' album or the darker parts of Johnny Cash's 'American Recordings'. In other words, it is fairly unremitting stuff, and not a place to which many are permitted to travel whilst still retaining majesty and grace. Yet grace is what it possesses in abundance, not least in the closing, haunting refrains of 'Joan Of Arc' and the messy love-triangle depicted in the magesterial 'Famous Blue Raincoat'. The self-loathing, however, kicks off from the very start, in perhaps Cohen's most bleak and oblique recording ever: I speak, of course, of the towering 'Avalanche,' with Cohen comparing himself to a "hunchback" with an "ugly hump at which you stare," and advocating to those "who wish to conquer pain...to learn to serve me well." I have turned these words over and over again in my mind, yet they never shed any light on what lay behind such self-castigating imagery. The closest I come is to thinking of Cohen as the ugly troll who imprisons Rapunzel in a tower in the famous fairytale, but it is still wide of the mark. This is followed up by 'Last Year's Man,' which more-or-less speaks for itself, though couched in sometimes oblique Biblical references to Jesus who was "the honeymoon/And Cain was just the man." Primarily though, the song is a beautifully-woven fabric around the subject of writer's block, which itself contains a stunning paradox. 'Dress Rehearsal Rag' is surely the song which forever fixed Cohen's image in the media press-pack as "doom-laden troubadour," but closer inspection proves this a complete falsehood. The song is chock-full of sweeping grandeur, replete with a wickedly dry and very jewish shot of humour, in that the song's protagonist is chastising himself for being too much of a coward to ever carry out such a highly dramatic act as self-murder. The humour continues in 'Diamonds In The Mine' and 'Sing Another Song, Boys,' which plays out like some deranged Victorian melodrama. This desolate beauty owes much to the closely-mic'd and bare-bones arrangements of Bob Johnson, who also produced 'Songs From A Room' and 'Live Songs' (on which he also plays organ and keyboards, as part of Cohen's backing band, The Army). In many ways the album is Cohen's definitive statement, and it is an absolute must for anyone who shares an admiration for the man.

Review Summary: Starkly Beautiful

Review:

This was the first Cohen album I listened to. At first I drowned in the dark, poetic, at times stark mood of this album... and I let myself get carried away. The first song 'Avalanche' rolls forward into a cruel love song replete with beautiful imagery and pulsating metaphors. It only gets better with 'Last Years Man': "And the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend..."

The next few songs set a stark, depressing, obtusely painful, yet somehow fragilely beautiful mood. The last 'Joan of Arc' culminates into one of the most fragile, most painful, exquisitely beautiful song. It is Cohen's poetry at its best.

His voice, brought into stark contrast by the female chorus, is deep, harsh, raw, and pulsating with feeling...

Review Summary: Timeless music

Review:

Like all Cohen's early albums, Songs Of Love & Hate has grown in stature down the years. Famous Blue Raincoat was beautifully covered by Jennifer Warnes on her album of the same name which also contains a duet with Cohen on a longer version of Joan Of Arc. Sing Another Song Boys is Cohen at his bitter best, its harsh chorus atypical of the image of the subdued folkie but pointing to later songs like Lover Lover Lover on 1974's New Skin For The Old Ceremony.

The fierce and powerful Diamonds In The Mine is in the same vein, where the celestial female vocals are particularly effective in balancing Cohen's raw voice on this tale of stunning imagery. (In retrospect, in tone and delivery these two songs are not too far removed from tracks like Iodine or Paper-Thin Hotel on his much-criticized Phil Spector produced album Death Of A Ladies Man).

Besides those two, the other tracks are typical early Cohen. With astonishing elegance and simplicity, the haunting melodies, poetic lyrics and ragged voice have a way of establishing themselves in the consciousness of the listener. Few other artists touch the strings of the soul in the way that Cohen does. Perhaps Richard Thompson comes close now and again, as do Nick Drake, Lou Reed on Berlin, Nick Cave and definitely Swans and Angels Of Light. Songs Of Love and Hate is another jewel in Cohen's crown of ageless music.