RECENT SONGS - CD

Though he's long been revered as the brooding writer of some of Canada's most famous contemporary verse, Leonard Cohen's wicked sense of humour has often been overlooked. Rarely is the balance of tragedy and comedy as compelling as it is on 1979's Recent Songs, the low-key follow-up to the Phil Spector-produced Death of a Ladies' Man. A beguiling softness and warmth that recall his earliest recordings replace the aggression of that album. The softly strummed guitars and delicate violin lines perfectly suit the opener, "The Guests" (also the opening song for Cohen's TV special, I Am a Hotel), and bittersweet love songs like "The Window" and "The Traitor." Yet his sense of the perverse is evident in the mariachi arrangement (!) for French-Canadian folk tune "The Lost Canadian (Un Canadien Errant)" and in the conceit of "Ballad of the Absent Mare," in which Cohen likens himself to a forlorn cowboy and his errant lady to a disagreeable horse. Only a great lover could get away with that sort of thing. --Jason Anderson

RECENT SONGS CD RECENT SONGS CD RECENT SONGS CD