Old Ideas Leonard Cohen. Released December 31, 2012. Microangelo On Display V6.10.10 Retail-fosi. Old Ideas Tracklist. Going Home Lyrics. Show Me the Place Lyrics. Darkness (Ft. Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas is 'more of the stuff that has made Cohen indispensable for six decades: desire, regret, suffering, misanthropy, love, hope, and hamming it up'. You have entered The Leonard Cohen Files. Old Ideas World Tour 2012-2013. Father's Day- An old (late 1970's) photo from Leonard's family album. Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for Old Ideas - Leonard Cohen on AllMusic - 2012 - Leonard Cohen, has always possessed a droll.

Old Ideas is, in its own tender, smirking, -y way, a clever title. In one sense, the ideas here are ones we've heard from Cohen before: Life is a nostalgic, sorrowful experience punctuated by the occasional joke; language can clarify as much as it can obscure; and lust is one of the highest forms of prayer. Designfoil Full Version. In another sense, Cohen is telling us that the ideas on this album-- home, healing, origins, and endings-- are ideas that take on a starker, more metaphorical weight as time goes on. We can trust Cohen to know: Over the past 77 years, he has, in a graceful but inevitable way, become old. Cohen's voice has always sounded deep, flat, and naturalistic-- the kind of performance that attempts to sound like it's no performance at all. To describe the changes in it over the past 10 or 15 years, I defer in part to those little booklets that come around the necks of good Scotch: A powerful body of peat smoke with a briny finish.

In essence, a whisper-- the voice of a voice whose center has been carved away. Old Ideas doesn't remind me of Bob Dylan as much it does of late Johnny Cash records, or even Charlie Louvin's: documents of voices so heavy and close that to hear them is to smell the singer's breath and see the gradient of yellow on their teeth.

It's easy to think of Cohen as a folksinger since 'folksinger' is common shorthand for musicians who tend to privilege words over music. Cohen, though, tends to go where his musical collaborators and arrangers lead him, whether it's grimy dive-bar ballads, disco, bare-bones guitar blues, or orchestral elaborations. For a Zen monk who started his career as a poet, Leonard Cohen has used a lot of synth horns. Old Ideas is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to 'folk' music since the early 1970s. Backup singers sing passionate, wordless melodies; the bass sounds like the big, upright kind.

I think it's his first studio album in 20 years to not rely exclusively on drum machines for percussion. The musical setting suits the state of his voice, which is meant as a mixed compliment: One of the great things about hearing his 1980s and 1990s albums was trying to reconcile his heroic presence with all the Casios. Some of the best moments on Old Ideas-- like the bizarre foregrounding of synthesizer during the album's first thirty seconds-- prove that Cohen and his collaborators have the wits to remind listeners that as soon as tape is rolling, nothing-- no croak, no wail, no plea-- is all-natural. Reflexive Games Universal Crack on this page. Cohen's voice alone, though, is a gorgeous, singular instrument.