"Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery," the 70 year-old Leonard Cohen muses on his new album Dear Heather, "women have been exceptionally kind to my old age." And deservedly so: even today, his best songs are uniquely personal and decidedly honest. What made his best work remarkable, though, was an imitable talent as a lyricist that allowed his songs to transcend his own experience and speak to things far more universal?listen to his account of an affair with Janis Joplin in "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," or "Famous Blue Raincoat," his open letter of forgiveness to a brother who had slept with his wife.
Almost forty years after his first release, Cohen remains a great poet. Still, Dear Heather sounds like an album made by a man at the end of his career. The styles of music are disjointed, and while some work (like the trippy "The Letters" and the somber "Morning Glory"), the overall effect is to make the album sound forced and tired. Worse, the backing instrumentals in several pieces (like the grating "We'll Go No More a-Roving") are what one would expect to hear in an airport bar at cocktail hour.
The most disheartening thing about Dear Heather, however, is the distance Cohen places between himself and his music. Several of the songs are merely adaptations of other writers' work, and though his own lyrics are often brilliant, they lack any of the incisiveness of his early work. Content, perhaps, with a long career built upon examining the world up close, Cohen has adopted the attitude of an elder spokesman, doling out advice on things he no longer has any interest in experiencing. The fact that the album's best song ("Tennessee Waltz") was recorded in 1985 only serves to highlight the fact that Cohen, for all his brilliance, may have lost more than just his voice.
In contrast, on his conceptual double-album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Nick Cave seems to have recovered some of the fire that's been absent from recent releases like the awful Nocturama.
Agitated and paranoid about recent international events, Cave takes advantage of his powerful voice and the best backing band to turn Abattoir Blues into a bleak fire-and-brimstone sermon. The disc's title is a reference to what he's called "numbness in the face of escalating violence" (on "Nature Boy," he laments "My boy sat down...to watch the news on TV / I saw some ordinary slaughter / I saw some routine atrocity"). Perhaps to prod us awake, it is full of apocalyptic imagery: "Do you feel what I feel, dear? / Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy / These things are not good for me."
In this context, Cave's dark sense of humor is especially pointed: on the title track, he sings "The dead are heaped across the land...But hey, I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand." And on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," he cracks a joke about the unfortunate fate of everyone from Marx to Gaugin to Nabokov even as he voices an envy of the immortality those artists enjoy: "I'd have liked everlasting life... But you weren't much of a muse / And I wasn't much of a poet."
Contrasted with Abattoir Blues, the more sedate The Lyre of Orpheus seems a response to Cave's suggestion that "It is beauty that is going to save the world." Although tracks like "Breathless" and "Babe, You Turn Me On" lack the elegiac grace of The Boatman's Call, they are among Cave's best love songs, and the choral piece "O Children" is somehow inspiring despite its dark subject matter.
Cave is of course aided greatly by the fantastic Bad Seeds, who supply Cave with some of their best and most versatile backing instrumentals yet. "Nature Boy" and "Supernaturally" are superb rock songs, "Breathless" borders on Calypso, and "Hiding All Away" recollects Cave's work with the Birthday Party before it explodes against a wall of six crunching guitars and forty voices.
On "Let the Bells Ring," Cave's tribute to his hero Johnny Cash, he laments that "Those of us not fit to tie the laces on your shoes / Must remain behind to testify through an elementary blues." He has often said similar things about Cohen, his other musical inspiration, and although Cohen's new work cannot approach what he once did, it is heartening to know that even as he fades his followers are producing some of the best music of their careers.