Leonard Cohen - Songs from a Room
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Free Music Notes for Songs from a Room
Free Music Review: Into This Furnace I Ask You Now to Venture
Hit: 5 Stars
The first time I heard this, a friend of mine played side B of the LP. I fought in the Old Revolution. Of course, we were very young, and we thought that we were winning. I can't pretend, I still feel very much like singing, as they carried the bodies away. I wish I could find the words to tell what this music meant to me, back then, in the day. Cohen was clearly an alchemist looking for a chemical marriage, an ancient starry-eyed pilgrim, a mystical gnostic. He had been down the river, and he was back with guidance for the rest of us tenderfeet who had already experienced sandbars and snags and were desperately confused about just what was going on. Over the years I have found that I prefer different songs now than I used to. The Partisan, even though he didn't compose it, fits in well with his overall ouvre. You know, he is just brutally frank. Like a beast with it's horns he has torn every one who has reached out to him.Cohen never struck me as really all that modern in his sensibilities. He evokes European cabarets, cigarette smoke and absinthe. He reminds me of Kurt Weill, Bertholt Brecht, Edith Piaf. His music is ghostly, from another time, mixing metaphors from many peripatetic traditions; somethig old and borrowed and blue. Bhagavan Das tells the story, in his autobiography, of how it was Leonard Cohen, in Crete, who put the idea into his head to run away to India..."If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." -- BokononFree Music Review: New Tour, New Ears for an Old Album
Hit: 5 Stars
Seems fitting that a day before the first Cohen tour in 15 years was announced today that I randomly heard A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes on my iPod. That sent me home to listen to the whole Songs from a Room CD, something I hadn't done in at least 15 years. It's always been overlooked a bit, I think, wedged as it was between his debut and the new direction (for then) and very dark Songs of Love and Hate. It's also under-represented on Essential Leonard Cohen, with only Bird on a Wire and The Partisan included.
Leonard has always been late night listening and never more than here. The vocals are mostly quiet, low-key, and -- for Leonard -- more on key than not. The arrangements are equally simple. And the mood, despite five songs of revolution and other violence, is consistently introspective. Even in those five, the lyric sings of individuals, Issac facing his father's knife, the quarreling heroes, the partisans who die alone to protect the cause.
There are a handful of songs here that don't really engage me -- Isaac has always been way too biblical for my taste and The Butcher and You Know Who I Am (the latter in both versions) just drag. But the rest is a beautiful mix of memory. loss and (in the perfect Tonight Will Be Fine) acceptance of both. Today I feel like cuts 3-6, highlighted with Seems So Long Ago, Nancy, are as good a set of four consecutive cuts as Leonard ever put on record.
Songs from a Room is nearly forty years old, old enough for me to think it may be ageless.
Free Music Review: Difficult to Love and Well Worth the Effort
Hit: 5 Stars
This album is dry as bones and lean as a desert. It is the first Cohen album I owned -- on vinyl -- and it took me a while to latch on to it. But it was so worth it. Every passing year I seem to love it more.
"Story of Isaac" was the first thing to hook me; it is almost a chimera of two songs that are not closely related -- a biblical story from the point of view of the boy about to be sacrificed, and an antiwar song that recognizes the violence in all of us -- but they set each other off well.
It seems wrong to blather on and on about an album that is beautiful because it is so spare. When you look up the word "plaintive" in the dictionary there should be an illustration of this album cover. I hope the new remixes don't run over that austerity. This is music that gives you space to breath, and think, instead of pounding you over the head with mindless sound. I have the earlier CD, and when I play it I find myself missing the vinyl crackles.
Free Music Review: Half a great album.
Hit: 3 Stars
I guess that most artsits would be lucky to create an album like Songs from a Room; It's half a masterpiece, and most musicains have never even recorded an eighth of one. Of course, Leonard Cohen isn't "most musicians." He's made some of the greatest music of his generation, works that, at their best, rival those of Bob Dylan in terms of sheer poetic vertuosity. Seen in that light, Songs from a Room isn't a great album. Certainly, it's a very good one, a record with plenty of great songs and musical moments. There are cutting lyrical insights here, and several subtly beautiful melodies. Unfortunatly, there are also far too many uninspired songs and uninteresting musical ideas to call this a great album.
The best songs here demonstrate Cohen's unique songwriting abilities: the chilling "Story of Isaac" is a tense, nightmarish study of generational friction and self sacrifice. Cohen's lyrics are bitter, bruised, and full of genuine menace. In the song's spine-tingling conclusion, Cohen spits: "When it all comes down to dust/ I will kill you if I must/ I will help you if I can," brilliantly summarizing a bleak but deeply felt view of human nature. "The Butcher" runs along similar lines; with its brutally simple guitar chords and stark lyrical imagery, the song conveys the feeling of bitter disilousionment with startling accuracy. "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is as haunting as it is beautiful. Its ghostly, spare melody is the ideal framing device for Cohen's brittle, regretful lyrics- it's a song full of painful memories and quiet loss. Interestingly, one of the best songs here wasn't even written by Cohen- "The Partisan" is a cover of a World War II era ballad that tells the story of a member of the French Resistance. Cohen's performance smolders with quiet, but undeniably present, tension, his voice electric with barely subdued nervous energy.
But not every song on the album is as good as these four- "A Bunch of Lonesome Heros" could have been an excellent song, but its gorgeously dramatic melody is buried under an incredibly unpleasant production, which bathes the music in echo and odd backing instruments. The half-formed lyrics don't help much, either. "You Know Who I Am" matches a convoluted guitar line with some incredibly pretentious lyrics ("I am the distance you put between/ all of the moments that we will be"), and "Tonight Will Be Fine,' despite being bouncy and jaunty, is completely joyless. Cohen's whistling during the final verse is just plain annoying. "The Old Revolution" and "Lady Midnight" are only halfway interesting in terms of lyrics and melody, and each one fails to leave a lasting impression. Finally, there's "Bird on a Wire." Although it's probably the most well-known (and perhaps well-liked) track on this album, I honestly think that it's the weakest song here. Cohen's performance is annoyingly melodramatic, full of painful high notes (a poor attempt to cover up the lack of genuine emotion in the man's voice). The music itself is overly sweet and completely inconsequential: the guitar line is a dull, mumbling cliche, and it's augmented by an equally worthless string section. The lyrics are direct but half-baked. Although the first few lines ("Like a bird on the wire/ like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried. in my way/ to be free") are genuinly poetic, they're counterbalanced by some of Cohen's most insufferably over-earnest declerations ("I will make it all up to thee," he sings, has voice raspy and insincere).
So, that leaves us with an album that, at its best moments, is as powerful and transcendant as anything Cohen has ever written. But at its worst...
Free Music Review: Masterpiece enhanced
Hit: 5 Stars
Leonard Cohen followed up his debut album with another masterpiece, this collection of magnificent songs of solitude, despair and resignation. Besides The Partisan, a song about the French resistance with its beautiful French verses and female vocals, all compositions are by Cohen.
The most popular number here is Bird On A Wire that has been covered by artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Judy Collins, Rita Coolidge, Tim Hardin, The Neville Brothers and Jennifer Warnes.
For some reason, the opening lines of Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes make me think of Frodo's journey to Mordor in Lord Of The Rings: "A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes/Were smoking out upon the open road." Other highlights include The Story Of Isaac and The Old Revolution, in both of which Cohen's characteristic Biblical imagery surfaces, and the somber Lady Midnight with its many layers of meaning.
Seems So Long Ago is a wistful confessional dirge whilst You Know Who I Am is a delicate love poem with esoteric undertones: "I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one". The mood lightens up on the former closing track Tonight Will Be Fine with its catchy melody, driving rhythm and erotic lyric, although even here the sadness is just a sigh away.
This reissue booklet includes liner notes by Anthony DeCurtis, one full-color and four black & white photographs plus a full-color painting of a chair. Both extra tracks were originally produced by David Crosby and for reissue by Bruce Dickinson. The first, Like A Bird, is an earlier version of Bird On The Wire. This version is less flowing, more halting than the familiar one. Nothing To One is the earlier version of You Know Who I Am.
Cohen's sublime music has a transcendent, spiritual quality. These haunting songs "from a room" have lost none of their poetic impact after 4 decades; their grace, elegance and beauty shine on.
I'm Your Man
I'm Your Fan
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