Review Summary: Except for this, my lips are sealed forever.
Leonard Cohen's poetry has always sounded refined and precise. He utilises words with weight; words that have picked up serious symbolic and emotive baggage as they've passed from tongue to tongue, chisel to tablet, quill to parchment, pen to paper. Such historic food for philosophical thought as life, death, love, hate, spirit, flesh, and divinity are merged with the profoundly personal to create a body of work that now reads as a moving tapestry of a man who lived a tale well worth the telling, and died content in the knowledge that the world will get along just fine without him. To paraphrase the closing track from the posthumously produced
Thanks for the Dance, why get hung up on the inevitable death of an old man when hummingbirds can fly f
ucking
backwards?!
The lyrical content of
Thanks for the Dance is lightly dusted with a sense of awe and humility. Although Cohen once proclaimed mid-poem, “I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is,” his declaration of “You were born to judge the world / Forgive me but I wasn't” in
The Night of Santiago suggests that he is a few thousand pathologic degrees of self-importance short of West. In fact, his more Eastern leanings likely help shape his view of existence as a gift, both in the triumph of love and in deepest turmoil. It is with a lifetime's perspective that he can calmly state to (presumably) Marianne, “Thanks for the dance / And the baby you carried / It was almost a daughter or a son.” Utterances such as this are woven throughout this record and delivered with such a tangible sense of finality that as soon as
Listen to the Hummingbird came to a close on my first listen, I set down my eighth glass of Shiraz and started feverishly dialling numbers of loved ones to deliver hefty harangues of questionable quality.
To attempt to justify the efficacy of Leonard Cohen's vocal performance would be an exercise in redundancy akin to trying to prove that sh
it smells. Suffice it to say that Cohen himself was entirely correct when he said he was “born with the gift of the golden voice,” and with that we need no longer sniff, we can simply deposit the log back into the dunny and flush.
In a world of Tupac holograms, where James Dean is being reanimated via the magic of CGI to star in a new film, and sequel upon sequel to Stieg Larsson's
Millenium trilogy just keep f
ucking appearing,
Thanks for the Dance is a surprisingly tasteful addition to the enterprise of the departed. Miraculously, it doesn't even feel vaguely superfluous to
You Want It Darker. Adam Cohen, Leonard's son, had recorded the vocals for this album with his father around the time of the
You Want It Darker sessions, and they had discussed Leonard's ideas for the instrumentation before he passed. In the three years since Adam lost his father, he invited various musicians to help him in realising his father's final vision. The result of their emotionally arduous work is a spacious production filled with various little flourishes. There are a couple of weaker songs on the album, along with the occasional arrangement that could have been developed more thoroughly, but ultimately this album justifies its existence against Leonard Cohen's non-existence supremely well. It's well thought through, tightly performed, and provides a tasteful accompaniment to the nonpareil main event- an iconic voice providing closure to an iconic career.
F
uck me, hummingbirds can fly
upside down?!
