Telegraph (UK) review

[jarkko]

From Dick:

Telegraph, UK 10/25

Leonard Cohen

Dear Heather, Columbia, £13.99

He went up a Californian mountain to join a Buddhist monastery, came down with a bunch of poems and songs, and subsequently released 2001's patchy, sparse-sounding 10 New Songs.

Now, in what for Leonard Cohen amounts to a flurry of creative activity, he's back with this strange, disparate, occasionally marvellous collection, on which his voice descends to new depths of husky rumbliness.

Often he's not singing, but reciting poetry in his droll, dry Canadian accent, talking about a time of life (he's now 70) when women come to him and bend over his bed and, as he shivers, "cover me up like a baby".

And when he does sing, at times it's almost like the sound of one man disappearing: on Morning Glory he's just a low mumble, barely audible among angelic female voices and – not for the first time on an album that is too often let down by its instrumentation – an irksome squelchy synthesizer.

But then he comes rumbling back on The Faith, a magnificent thing based on a Quebec folk song, with a plaintive piano, accordion and strings, and a gently swooping refrain of "Love, aren't you tired yet?" The answer, apparently is no; world-weary, perhaps, but not tired, not yet. David Cheal