Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas – review

You don't want new ideas from Leonard Cohen. You want to sink into that coal-black pit of a voice and contemplate the essentials: lust and loss; failure and redemption; the appalling comedy of existence and its inescapable end. His 12th "manual for living with defeat" answers that longing, while ever so gently ribbing it. "I love to speak with Leonard," he rumbles on opening song Going Home, "he's a sportsman and a shepherd, he's a lazy bastard living in a suit." In other words: don't take everything he says as gospel, even if it's frequently dressed up as such. Perhaps inevitably, it's the debonair sportsman, not the earnest shepherd of lost souls, who has the best tunes on Old Ideas. Anyhow is fantastic, less a song than a suggestively seductive exhalation. The Darkness is even better, all seedy guitar, slithery Hammond and filthy chuckles. But when he abandons burlesque for sincerity on Crazy to Love You, his unadorned emotion is devastating.