leonardcohenforum.com

No updates in the last few days? Any further titbits from those who heard the album would be most welcome.

Sylvie Simmons said there was a review embargo currently in place. Her review should be in the next issue of Mojo. Any idea will there be any official reviews before that? In other words, when does the embargo lift and when can we expect some mainstream reaction?

You want it darker

For some color and size matters
Peter

Compilation of comments here:

http://cohencentric.com/want-darker-leo ... mary-page/

Official reviews still embargoed , of course.

When is the embargo lifted?

JudasPriest wrote:When is the embargo lifted?

When the reviews start

Bennyboy wrote:

JudasPriest wrote:When is the embargo lifted?

When the reviews start

I don't see the point of having an embargo on reviews so close to the release.
I'm sure all reviews will heap praise , whet our appetite , and increase sales !

Mojo came out last month on the 15th so presumably it will be around that date again in September so another week or so is my guess.

October issue of Uncut is at the newsstands here in Finland. No review in this issue. Probably the same with MOJO, thanks to the embargo. So looking forward to the November issues.

Thanks for letting us know, Jarkko.
This time I'm waiting for the album so sincerely and personally, I can wait: without quotations, reviews, previews.
Hope everyone is ok with waiting - patiently - Friends!

It shocks me to see how much information people seem to want before the actual release. Unless I can actually hear the album before release, I prefer to be completely surprised the first time I press the PLAY button.

alb123 wrote:It shocks me to see how much information people seem to want before the actual release. Unless I can actually hear the album before release, I prefer to be completely surprised the first time I press the PLAY button.

Would you rather not even know the album exists and will be released? Presumably Leonard himself approved of the preview listening sessions and the fact that people would talk about the album as a result?

jarkko wrote:October issue of Uncut is at the newsstands here in Finland. No review in this issue. Probably the same with MOJO, thanks to the embargo. So looking forward to the November issues.

Think the October issues have been out since Mid August (in UK/Irl at any rate) and the Nov issues should be out in the not too distant future- I'm guessing towards the end of next week.

Bennyboy wrote:Would you rather not even know the album exists and will be released?

I've listened to the first 11 LC's albums years or even decades after their release.
None of us had a chance to share any thoughts on new songs "in real time" prior to 1990s.
I bless the current time of immediate connections and I can't imagine my own life without them, but anyway - I don't listen to the new albums of the biggest artists of my own musical universe since I need to hear this new music. It should correspond with my own feelings and emotions, otherwise that's nothing but an audial masturbation.
Tonight I've seen the new Nick Cave documentary, now I'm listening to the Bad Seeds' new album. It was more than just a pleasure to be among the first thousands of its listeners, but I'm happy to be among them mostly because of a great company I've been in, and my current state of mind.

Goldin, we just saw the Nick Cave doco too. So raw and visceral - and oddly, but effectively, oblique in terms of the loss and its circumstances.
It's a gift to have Skeleton Tree, plus a new LC, coming all at once and so glad that the latter should, (well, at least I hope) be much more cheerful!

Hello Everyone – I have not posted here for a very long time. I was wrong - but I had thought the action had moved to Leonard Cohen’s facebook page. On that site a musical interpretation of “You Want It Darker” by Paul Kalkbrenner, was posted yesterday.
I imagine most of you have seen the text of “You Want It Darker”. Yesterday on facebook, I posted my take about the meaning of one of the darkest of the “Darker” verses as follows:

>> Sometimes it can’t be easy to be Leonard Cohen once the Zeitgeist or the Repressed Collective Conscience decide to assist in blackening his pages.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”. Where is the crack in the some of the darkness of this poem? I would like the light to get in.

I think “You Want It Darker” sheds light on dark truths but I can’t figure out who the “dealer” is. Today is ‘On That Day’plus15, so I would like to touch on the fourth verse of this poem. In too many corners of the world “They’re lining up the prisoners”, still. A terrible darkness began ‘On That Day’ and Leonard set a wise example of keeping calm, with his “I’m just holding the fort” (the psychological one).

Later, came the brutal darkness of certain over-reactions to 9/11. We were fortified by the light shining through the crack of Leonard’s ‘Anthem’. Yet his bells also rang out this rebuke: “Can’t run no more with that lawless crowd, while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud”.

I just saw a documentary called “The Gatekeepers”. It is about six former heads of an Israeli security agency. “The future is bleak. It’s dark the future” said one of the former Israeli spy-masters, as he added: “We’ve become cruel, using the excuse of the war against terror”.
This documentary is not just a frank assessment of one single national security state, but it provides a window, an example, a crack of light into the kind of darkness exhibited by the worlds national security states. Many want it even darker now. Internationally, oversight eyes have shied away from this darker, darkness and a collective failure to resist it, bears responsibility for many a fading light.

As the post 9/11 darkness got darker, Leonard in ‘Almost Like The Blues’ and in all of his humanity, was reduced to “staring at his shoes”, when he “saw some people starving” and “There was murder” and “there was was rape”.
In “You Want It Darker” he discovers on our behalf, that he “had permission” – “To murder and to maim”. Oh, my goodness.
Where is the crack in this darker, darkness?
The crack is the very truth which is declared here.
And it is up to us to shine the light.
“That’s how the light gets in”. <<

‘You Want It Darker” is serious poetry. Dark, haunting, and beautiful in it’s humanity. I can’t wait for the rest of the the album.

Cheers,
Klaus