Leonard Cohen - Various Positions
The scene depicts Leonard Cohen in the Laurentides, smoking a cigarette. The atmosphere descends from the walls, burying the notes of an album that has undergone various transformations. This reflects the mechanics of the Canadian artist, who, in his first fifty years, has not sought to revive memories but has instead established new challenges to define.
Tragedy strikes with new attire, inspiring a different, eloquent song. This song expresses thoughts in the twilight of time, never devoid of panic, yet capable of sowing it.
The heart shatters: they are stories that dim the light, and where his attempt was evident in presenting atypical rainbows. Despite this, Leonard smiles, puffs, smokes, and sings even more closed, clutching his shoulders.
The title and these words leave the imagination with a bittersweet joy that traverses the absolute: an artistic process that aimed to disrupt stories without a microphone, let alone a megaphone. Intuition emerges as the adversary of escapism, entangled in a labyrinth of mental cables that reside in melancholic rivers in the stormy landscape where the singer requires a guide, a deity, and a cast of characters to navigate the treacherous path of sin.
Cheerfulness evokes romance and music, the true protagonist of this work, arriving like an ecstasy that precisely understands the context. The stave assumes the role of a ferryman, introducing new styles, accompanied by an almost silent orchestra that subtly suggests sounds and colours to tales that have never existed before.
The courage not to abandon his acoustic guitar alone demonstrates that the past was not a lifeline but a piggy bank to be broken.
The realism, the darkness, and the brilliance of the breakup transform into the sighs of these arrangements, of these soulful choruses, where country music slows down and psychedelia immerses itself in the river of love. This explains these compositions that blend the authenticity of an atypical complex discourse, out of context for the 1984 year that was consecrated to be the decisive year for the demolition of slowness and words that, with morality at hand, could slow down the excess in consumption.
A horseman emphasising slow motion is painful and indigestible.
However, Cohen’s creations are always meticulously crafted. It is quite easy to avoid his dishes. And that is precisely what transpired in the lead-up to the release of this nocturnal masterpiece.
Piano, strings, double bass, electric guitar, and a female vocal line create a dark, radiant light that illuminates Cohen’s soul, which undergoes an epochal and unforeseen transformation. An otherworldly presence takes possession of his writing: his hatching becomes more pronounced, painful, yet simultaneously he experiences comprehensible dichotomies that breathe life into the artistic structure.
Darkness, his constant companion, becomes a dancing spirit, an unusual waltz, where the rhythm reveals the pretext for a deception that manifests in at least three tracks, for a mode of expression that embraces gospel and blues without revealing the stylistic characteristics.
The emphasis lies in the singing, which is sunnier, with the voice’s medium-high register, and the notion that those words already held a profound emotional resonance and did not require repetition in that baritone tone that, while charming one generation, risked alienating others.
A compromise? Perhaps, but ultimately, these chords, imbued with tobacco, alcohol, and drama, harmoniously aligned by an almost misplaced treble clef, confer upon the album a sanctity that is scarcely discernible after the initial listening.
As always, the rhyme scheme remains unpredictable, drained but capable of providing unexpected comfort by delivering unexpected jabs and punches that, unfortunately for the listener, they find themselves subjected to.
Reflection on the human condition remains the central theme of his writings, yet it is evident how he avoids direct violent confrontations, opting instead for a prairie where he can introduce unexpected elements to bewilder and confuse everyone in a row of drunken grass.
The depth of his work transcends the philosophical realm, as exemplified in the first track where even the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps find a fleeting semblance of happiness. Moreover, it is striking when discontent is entrusted to the refrain rather than the strophes in a story, a substantial reversal that demonstrates a complete disregard for contemporary song forms. The country and western influences, while not exclusive, underscore the versatility of his music and highlight the need for its range of moral, technical, and musical tools to be updated, not only stylistically.
The reverberation of his music is numerous, perhaps excessive, and this very reason makes the listening experience pleasant, an oxymoron that enriches the soul while simultaneously impoverishing the habit. Leonard intrigues, stings, emphasises, but never invokes alliances. He journeys on the ship of his thoughts with a voyage that will find greater precision in subsequent albums. A timeless work since its publication, it serves as a watershed, a traffic light, and a medieval shot that sharpens attention and perplexity. It offers no comfort zone, as it is not possible to discuss the author who most attempted to shatter conventional notions by disguising them in silk.
One is moved and puzzled by the sounds, the styles that are never truly heterogeneous but acknowledge that in a homosexual individual, there is never one branch superior to another.
Songs like trembling columns, fir-trees, sacks of rubbish to be thrown into the square of our madness, a cumbersome incumbency where beauty and love challenge ugliness and hatred in a circuit where understanding (ours) is relegated to the periphery.
In this context, compared to Bob Dylan, Leonard demonstrates a clear superiority: verse is not presented as a display of quality, but rather as the necessity that through artifice one can descend into consciousness.
Intimacy is intertwined with the concept of immortality, manifesting in a silent dance that does not perspire or drip onto the legs, but instead produces toxic, viscous substances that permeate the corridors of the mind. Desire and struggle find themselves far from a conventional setting, such as a bench, to engage in discussions, while the dynamics of relationships engender infections and discouragements.
For Cohen, the higher power is not a divine entity, and guilt intersects with those who seek solace but find it elusive, leading to despair.
Death returns, somber and gradual, preparing for the inevitable transition to the afterlife with a distinctive approach that skillfully presents the inevitable without making it overly burdensome.
The complexity of emotions is seamlessly integrated into the music, characterised by its slow tempo and violent intensity, which effectively restrains and encapsulates both the false and the true within a game that Leonard masterfully dominates, exhibiting a consistent pattern that deviates significantly from his previous albums.
He presents dilemmas, akin to fireworks illuminating the curtains of an exploration that is perpetually inflamed by icy gems that, as they acquire a reddish hue, centre the primary focus of his exposition.
Conflict arises from distant corners that refuse to seek proximity, leading Cohen to adopt a strategy of encompassing his stories within a limited timeframe of a few years.
This approach proves to be remarkably effective.
He meticulously safeguards his verses, entrusting them to strings and muffled drums, as well as unconsciously graceful brush strokes. However, the final result emerges as a splendid emotional funeral.
It offers comfort, compassion, and caresses reminiscent of eighteenth-century arpeggios and frescos that evoke the ambiance of Italian quarters in the nineteenth century. Another enigma, another St. Patrick’s well that, as it unfolds, presents a complex puzzle that challenges comprehension. Before its prolific generosity, one experiences a sense of poverty, akin to losing one’s wealth, for a tragedy that borders on the comedic.
“The Hills to Rejoice In”: One could commence from this point to establish, in the loss of meaning, a departure from the desire to allow one’s cultural baggage access to their own. Cohen divides, sifts, distances, and does so with his voice as a steadfast oak tree, where, gradually, he leads us down to tear us down with his beauty…
Old age reveals its teeth through behavioural conflicts that make the notes harsh, in an ambiguous lightness that stuns, captivates but simultaneously disconcerts and directs our thoughts towards the places of inevitable concealment.
The musicians are disciplined, attentive, akin to an orchestra that discerns orders, scores, and dry gestures in the maestro: no escapes permitted, just as no smears and a sacred sense of performance that transforms the disc into a sonic landscape traversing the tempest of time. It is inconsequential whether the subject matter is topical, past, or future: everything becomes a vibrant energy where his words and notes are molecules that leave you paralysed and sweet dreams, bordering on a perilous allure.
Leonard Cohen entrusts the wind with the task of bringing all complexity to take a shower and chooses pink drops, a whiskey brand, and considerable strength in verses that in 1984 appeared to originate from Atlantis, Babylon (as mentioned in the album’s opening song), embarking on a journey that does not consume but, in fact, amplifies the entire experience in a dramatic sense towards the exploration of truth.
The notes are embedded in the essence of these lampposts, and the moral becomes an atypical yet fundamental blues, which succeeds in making time the silent observer that allows entry due to its poetic resonance that akin to a muse captivates.
However, its wisdom becomes unfulfilled if the listener fails to comprehend that, precisely because we are not confronted with a masterpiece, this artistic endeavour demonstrates greater adherence to the truth: study and introspection become indispensable, to complete that profound sense of shock that this work is capable of generating…
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
23 February 2025
https://open.spotify.com/intl-it/album/6I58qJMqZHhb8jtNT3CuJB?si=BSZi-tlSQIKDKB8ZRpnePQ
