OB1
Well-Known Member
Leon Russell.
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The Album Review Club - End of Round #9 Break (page 1904)
- Thread starter RobMCFC
- Start date
stonerblue
Well-Known Member
That blokes son?One posthumous album
stonerblue
Well-Known Member
Phil Collins.One posthumous album
denislawsbackheel
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 28 May 2008
- Messages
- 26,000
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- We went to Rotherham…
I’ll post it now seeing one miserable twat has guessed.
Sometime in 1968 a 17 year old Denislawsbackheel went to a party with a blond in tow and in one of the incense addled rooms a group of party goers were huddled round a Dansette listening to a recent release of the first album by a Canadian singer songwriter called Leonard Cohen. "Songs Of" was the album title and I was transfixed by its raw simplicity.
Thus started a lifelong love affair with the music of ""Laughing" Len. The blond didn't last until the launch of his second album.
Over the following decades I collected every album on release on vinyl. I have every album he ever recorded and every tribute album. I was fortunate enough to see him several times in the 70s and later when he did his world tours after coming out of retirement I saw him at the Manchester Opera house in the greatest gig I have ever seen, MEN arena and the Edinburgh tattoo stage.
My choice for your delectation this week is Cohen's fifth album from 1977 entitled "Death of a Ladies Man".
After his fourth album Cohen's career was in decline and the gestation of this fifth, produced by Phil Spector was convoluted. I quote from a Rolling Stone magazine review of 1978;
" the tales surrounding Cohen’s seventh album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, produced by the infamous Phil Spector, are neither poetic nor kind, and the LP probably has fewer admirers than buyers. Cohen himself, though he feels the songs are unusually strong, has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the record. Spector, it seems, simply took what the singer felt were tapes still in progress, kept them under lock and key, mixed them like a solitary mad genius and released the album without bothering to consult with his artist. Not everyone likes a surprise, but Cohen has both dealt out and dealt with enough superromantic irony in his lifetime to walk through it as if it were a fine spring rain.
With such a history, it’s fitting that Death of a Ladies’ Man more than lives up to its notoriety. It’s either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and I’m betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving. To me, both men would seem to belong to that select club of lone-wolf poets, Cohen haunted by new skin and old ceremonies and Spector by the reverse. While the latter apparently begs to differ with most of the contemporary world, the former has been known to defer to amatory begging to gain all the experience he possibly can from the sisterly sea around us. Both these guys know what fame and longing are.
But it’s silly to take sides about this LP because so much of it is first-rate. Contrary to popular opinion, Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, arguably the best in rock & roll, are easily decipherable through the calliopean claustrophobia of Phil Spector’s sometimes-padded wall of sound. Actually, except for the very minor “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” (a rather pointless wallow in raunch) and “Fingerprints” (wrongheaded country music), Spector displays a good deal of sensitivity toward a type of material with which he’s never worked. Though his rock & roll hits were often delicate and deliberate mixtures of the simple and the grandiose, it was usually the music that was grandiose, not the words. With Cohen, everything’s the other way around.
A self-taught singer, Leonard Cohen can get by with six strings and a homemade melody if he has to, but his words are so moody and complex you can’t tell up from down, implosion from explosion. Yet Spector’s melodies, arrangements and production generally swim rather than sink, and though he provides an unusually dense aural fog (some thirty musicians and seventeen backup singers) for Cohen’s inner storms, no one gets run over here because of lack of vision.
While Spector’s contributions to Death of a Ladies’ Man are anything but lethal (“Memories” is an effective doo-wop nightmare), Cohen’s are still the kiss to build the dream on — if you can get to sleep at all after hearing “Iodine” and “Paper-Thin Hotel.” The latter is one of his double-edged, liberation-and-revenge songs about infidelity and a cheated lover’s claim of lack of jealousy (“A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I learned that love was out of my control”). Then, as the vocal begins to turn murderous (“I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing”), you realize the lover hasn’t been telling the truth. Then you realize he has been. It’s like thinking back to the beginning of one’s great failed romance or thinking ahead toward the inevitable finish of what is now sublime: after a while, you don’t want to, but what else is there? (“What happened to you, lover?” someone asks the singer on “I Left a Woman Waiting.” “What happened to my eyes/Happened to your beauty,” he answers. “What happened to your beauty/Happened to me.”)
“Death of a Ladies’ Man,” one of Cohen’s finest songs, is a seriocomic marvel that leaves you either anticipating great adventure or wondering if you’ve just had it. A man and a woman fall in love, and eventually the more realistic woman completely trashes the poor, romantic man, taking everything, including his sexual identity. (“The last time that I saw him/He was trying hard to get/A woman’s education/But he’s not a woman yet.”) The song’s incredible last verse manages to be terrifying, funny and philosophically awesome, all at the same time. It’s about life and love and could serve as an epitaph for most of us sharing this planet:
So the great affair is over
But whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant
And so deeply unimpressed
It’s like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far."
To say, as the review does, that the album has few admirers understates the case!
Most of his fans hated it and Cohen himself virtually disowned it. He never toured the album and only ever performed one of its songs, "Memories" in any of his subsequent tours. Whenever he discussed the album he always seemed embarrassed to even acknowledge its existence.
And yet for me it contained some of his strongest songs. "Death of a Ladies' Man" the track is an absolute classic and the album still regularly gets its place on my turntable for a listen.
Have a listen, try to overcome any prejudice you may have of Cohen and see if you can hear through Spector's production sound to the poetry beyond.
It’s on Spotify.
Sometime in 1968 a 17 year old Denislawsbackheel went to a party with a blond in tow and in one of the incense addled rooms a group of party goers were huddled round a Dansette listening to a recent release of the first album by a Canadian singer songwriter called Leonard Cohen. "Songs Of" was the album title and I was transfixed by its raw simplicity.
Thus started a lifelong love affair with the music of ""Laughing" Len. The blond didn't last until the launch of his second album.
Over the following decades I collected every album on release on vinyl. I have every album he ever recorded and every tribute album. I was fortunate enough to see him several times in the 70s and later when he did his world tours after coming out of retirement I saw him at the Manchester Opera house in the greatest gig I have ever seen, MEN arena and the Edinburgh tattoo stage.
My choice for your delectation this week is Cohen's fifth album from 1977 entitled "Death of a Ladies Man".
After his fourth album Cohen's career was in decline and the gestation of this fifth, produced by Phil Spector was convoluted. I quote from a Rolling Stone magazine review of 1978;
" the tales surrounding Cohen’s seventh album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, produced by the infamous Phil Spector, are neither poetic nor kind, and the LP probably has fewer admirers than buyers. Cohen himself, though he feels the songs are unusually strong, has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the record. Spector, it seems, simply took what the singer felt were tapes still in progress, kept them under lock and key, mixed them like a solitary mad genius and released the album without bothering to consult with his artist. Not everyone likes a surprise, but Cohen has both dealt out and dealt with enough superromantic irony in his lifetime to walk through it as if it were a fine spring rain.
With such a history, it’s fitting that Death of a Ladies’ Man more than lives up to its notoriety. It’s either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and I’m betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving. To me, both men would seem to belong to that select club of lone-wolf poets, Cohen haunted by new skin and old ceremonies and Spector by the reverse. While the latter apparently begs to differ with most of the contemporary world, the former has been known to defer to amatory begging to gain all the experience he possibly can from the sisterly sea around us. Both these guys know what fame and longing are.
But it’s silly to take sides about this LP because so much of it is first-rate. Contrary to popular opinion, Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, arguably the best in rock & roll, are easily decipherable through the calliopean claustrophobia of Phil Spector’s sometimes-padded wall of sound. Actually, except for the very minor “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” (a rather pointless wallow in raunch) and “Fingerprints” (wrongheaded country music), Spector displays a good deal of sensitivity toward a type of material with which he’s never worked. Though his rock & roll hits were often delicate and deliberate mixtures of the simple and the grandiose, it was usually the music that was grandiose, not the words. With Cohen, everything’s the other way around.
A self-taught singer, Leonard Cohen can get by with six strings and a homemade melody if he has to, but his words are so moody and complex you can’t tell up from down, implosion from explosion. Yet Spector’s melodies, arrangements and production generally swim rather than sink, and though he provides an unusually dense aural fog (some thirty musicians and seventeen backup singers) for Cohen’s inner storms, no one gets run over here because of lack of vision.
While Spector’s contributions to Death of a Ladies’ Man are anything but lethal (“Memories” is an effective doo-wop nightmare), Cohen’s are still the kiss to build the dream on — if you can get to sleep at all after hearing “Iodine” and “Paper-Thin Hotel.” The latter is one of his double-edged, liberation-and-revenge songs about infidelity and a cheated lover’s claim of lack of jealousy (“A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I learned that love was out of my control”). Then, as the vocal begins to turn murderous (“I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing”), you realize the lover hasn’t been telling the truth. Then you realize he has been. It’s like thinking back to the beginning of one’s great failed romance or thinking ahead toward the inevitable finish of what is now sublime: after a while, you don’t want to, but what else is there? (“What happened to you, lover?” someone asks the singer on “I Left a Woman Waiting.” “What happened to my eyes/Happened to your beauty,” he answers. “What happened to your beauty/Happened to me.”)
“Death of a Ladies’ Man,” one of Cohen’s finest songs, is a seriocomic marvel that leaves you either anticipating great adventure or wondering if you’ve just had it. A man and a woman fall in love, and eventually the more realistic woman completely trashes the poor, romantic man, taking everything, including his sexual identity. (“The last time that I saw him/He was trying hard to get/A woman’s education/But he’s not a woman yet.”) The song’s incredible last verse manages to be terrifying, funny and philosophically awesome, all at the same time. It’s about life and love and could serve as an epitaph for most of us sharing this planet:
So the great affair is over
But whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant
And so deeply unimpressed
It’s like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far."
To say, as the review does, that the album has few admirers understates the case!
Most of his fans hated it and Cohen himself virtually disowned it. He never toured the album and only ever performed one of its songs, "Memories" in any of his subsequent tours. Whenever he discussed the album he always seemed embarrassed to even acknowledge its existence.
And yet for me it contained some of his strongest songs. "Death of a Ladies' Man" the track is an absolute classic and the album still regularly gets its place on my turntable for a listen.
Have a listen, try to overcome any prejudice you may have of Cohen and see if you can hear through Spector's production sound to the poetry beyond.
It’s on Spotify.
journolud
Well-Known Member
Nah, all his albums are posthumousPhil Collins.
journolud
Well-Known Member
Great write up. Not my favourite Cohen album by a long way and subsequently listened to less. I’ll give it a good listen now though
Mancitydoogle
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 7 Aug 2017
- Messages
- 1,541
I remember buying this when it was first released and I’ve always kinda like it.
Although I’ve not heard it for decades.Good choice .I’m looking forward to reaquainting myself to it.
Although I’ve not heard it for decades.Good choice .I’m looking forward to reaquainting myself to it.
PragueBlue
Well-Known Member
Don't know this album but I do like Cohen. Looking forward to this.
OB1
Well-Known Member
Pass the razor blades!
Onholiday(somemightsay)
Well-Known Member
If there's time an 8 and with thoughts to follow..........Sorry @Onholiday(somemightsay) for the delay in responding, I'm just finally coming out of a very bad three days of Covid. I was going to round up the scores in a minute - if you have a score, now's the time.