DARK LIFE

At 82, Leonard Cohen shows no sign of giving up the creative ghost. Andy Gill hails another in a remarkable run of late-era albums from the great man

Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker

Download: You Want It Darker; Treaty; It Seemed The Better Way; Leaving The Table

"I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too,” sang Leonard Cohen four years ago on Old Ideas, the first of what now seems like a trilogy of late-blooming reflections on age, love and faith, each one darker than its predecessor – as, the title of this latest set suggests, we want it.

Mostly produced by the singer’s son Adam, You Want It Darker finds Cohen as frustrated and regretful as

any 82-year-old has a right to be, railing variously against the world, his own weakness and god. Sometimes, all three at once: “If thine is the glory, then mine is the shame,” he murmurs in “You Want It Darker”, an epistle to the big man upstairs in which all parties are party to the wretchedness of life. “I struggled with some demons, they were middle-class and tame,” he concedes, adding grimly, “I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim.” Dark enough for you?

While the song rides a typically Cohen-esque urbane loping bassline, his son’s production hinges on the iconic religious tones bookending the song, with the lowing synagogue choir (from the Montreal synagogue of Cohen’s own bar mitzvah) of the intro replaced for the fade by the ululations of a solo cantor. Elsewhere, the arrangements are similarly spartan, allowing Cohen’s shadowy baritone to state its case clearly. A lone, sadly rhapsodic violin and more gentle choral humming tints another song about loss of faith, “It Seemed The Better Way” (“...though no one but a fool would bless the meek today”), while simple piano and organ parts carry songs such as “If I Didn’t Have Your Love” and “On The Level”, while “Travelling Light” has the gait of a weary, enervated tango.

Gently marching strings furnish an aptly martial underscoring for the conflict imagery of “Treaty”, the latest of Cohen’s romantic mea culpas, which reveals how, for a Great Seducer, love is an essentially narcissistic, even solipsistic, pastime, its protagonist apologising “for that ghost I made you be”. It’s just one of several sharp, stinging twists casting new and unusual shadows on old themes in You Want It Darker, culminating in the mordant, bitter advice of “Steer Your Way”: “Steer your heart past the truth that you believed in yesterday/Such as fundamental goodness, and the wisdom of the way”. That’s plenty dark enough for now, thanks.

This review appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition