Old Ideas

Now well into his 78th year, Leonard Cohen has produced an album that is a master class in black comedy.

His longstanding battles with depression and his overflowing reservoirs of angst have meant that Cohen has invariably been viewed as a melancholic artist, but a dark humour has always lurked at his core. It teems throughout Old Ideas, an album that wears his perennial obsessions – life, love, sex, death, regret – like a comfortable old overcoat.

Cohen sets the tone on the opening Going Home, addressing his failings in the third person: "He's a lazy bastard, living in a suit." His mood of philosophical resignation bears witness to the six years he once spent on a Buddhist retreat: "He will speak these words of wisdom/Like a sage, a man of vision/Though he knows he's really nothing."

Musically, Old Ideas is a late-night album, suffused with wry reflections and dark tones. Cohen's laconic drawl has deepened to the point where it is a subterranean rumble. It's particularly effective on Anyhow, where he roguishly pleads for undeserved forgiveness from a lover to whom he has done serial wrongs: "I know you have to hate me, but could you hate me less?"

Even in his 30s, Cohen's albums were shot through with intimations of mortality, so it's impossible to convey just how poignant he sounds at 77. At the end of his days, the consummate wordsmith has produced a masterpiece.

Album Review by Ian Gittins