LEONARD COHEN

The gospel according to Leonard Cohen

by Matt Ashare

Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas (Columbia)

Leonard Cohen is unquestionably — and unabashedly — one of the stranger dudes to ever have sustained a musical career in the modern era. Sure, Dylan's eccentric, at times aggressively so. And there are plenty of oddballs who have gotten their 15 minutes over the past half-century. But Cohen has single-mindedly taken unconventional to a whole new level in his five-plus decades as a recording artist and performer.

       He alludes to as much in the opening verse of the portentous "Going Home," the first song on Old Ideas, his 12th proper studio album since he was first signed by the legendary Columbia A&R talent scout and producer John Hammond amid the flurry of the ’60s folk revival. "I Love to speak with Leonard/He's a sportsman and a shepherd/He's a lazy bastard/Living in a suit," he half-sings/half-whispers in that immediately recognizable cracked baritone that remains one of his many distinctive, if somewhat difficult, qualities — a sagacious voice that paradoxically manages to convey a sense of both genuine intimacy and cool detachment. Buoyed by little more than a few quiet organ chords, a choir of women's voices, and intermittent string embellishments, he continues what amounts to an internal monologue, intoning, "He will speak these words of wisdom/Like a sage, a man of vision/Though he knows he's really nothing/But the brief elaboration of a tube."

       That's Leonard Cohen in a nutshell: a suit-and-tied prophet of verse, confronting mortality, contemplating the dark depths of the soul, straining against the vicissitudes of life, embracing with wry wit his own unorthodoxy, finding humor and a kind of agnostic salvation in deceptively simple rhymes. It's what he's been, and it's what he remains on Old Ideas, a title that may indeed reflect his own realization that, to a large degree, he's still tackling many of the same themes — love, sex, religion, obsession, depression — that have marked his songwriting since his first album, 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen.

       Perhaps it was merely an accident of timing that Cohen has typically been cast among the folk luminaries who came of age in the turbulent ’60s. But Cohen was already an anomaly when he joined Dylan, Joan Baez, and their cohort in NYC. For starters, the now 77-year old Cohen grew up in the pre-rock and roll days of big-band jazz, beat poets, and Sinatra crooners. And he'd already established himself as a promising young writer of fiction and poetry before he embarked as a singer-songwriter. So it's not entirely surprising that he took a somewhat skewed approach to folk, or that, despite his many accolades (a Grammy lifetime achievement award, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, etc. . .), he’s always been a commercial outsider.

       But, if success can be measured by the number of other artists who have covered your songs, Cohen's career has been a triumph. From Judy Collins' 1966 version of "Suzanne," to the late Jeff Buckley's hymnotic reinterpretation of "Hallelujah," the Cohen songbook has been cherry picked by dozens upon dozens of performers from nearly every corner of the musical map. There are three Leonard Cohen tribute albums, featuring performers as diverse as R.E.M., U2, Nick Cave, the Pixies, Suzanne Vega, and Peter Gabriel. And, if you listen closely to Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea," you'll hear Kurt Cobain make this reference: "Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally.”

       The cult of Cohen simply endures. As does his timeless talent. There are echoes on Old Ideas of his folksinger days, most notably the fingerpicked acoustic tune "Crazy to Love You," a meditation on lost love that reaches the level of spiritual allegory when Cohen gently rasps, "I'm tired of choosing desire/Been saved by a sweet fatigue/The gates of commitment unwired/And nobody's trying to leave."

       Elsewhere, Old Ideas is shot through with gospel inflections, both in the musical arrangements and lyrics. The pitch-perfect female background harmonies that play call-and-response with Cohen’s gruff pronouncements on "Amen"; lines like "Show me the place where the Word became a man"; and the blues structure that underpins the aptly titled "Darkness," with its smooth groove, organ soloing, and, again, those gorgeous background vocals, all conjure images of the church — the Church of Leonard Cohen.

       And yet, Cohen is uniquely adept at sermonizing without resorting to the dogma of preaching. “Oh let the heavens hear it/The penitential hymn,” he proclaims in “Come Healing,” one of the sparest and most affecting tracks on the album, “Come healing of the spirit/Come healing of the limb/Behold the gates of mercy/In arbitrary space/And none of us deserving/The cruelty or the grace.” It’s one of those quiet, reflective moments with the power to make you stop and listen beyond the strangeness of Cohen’s voice. And then, as with so many of the songs here, you just might want to go back and hear it again. 

http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/01/gospel-according-leonard-cohen-ar-1656036/ 

JOLIE HOLAND

The slanted enchantments of Jolie Holland's new "Pint of Blood"

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 29, 2011
By Matt Ashare

 Songstress Jolie Holland draws a Pint of Blood

Texas-bred singer-songwriter Jolie Holland has been called a lot of things since her self-released 2003 debut Catulpa — really a bedroom demo — caught the ear of Tom Waits, who nominated it for the Shortlist music prize and helped get her signed to Epitaph’s Anti-imprint, where Waits, Nick Cave, and Neko Case are some of her labelmates. Deconstructed blues, gothic folk, and rootsy Americana are all part of her lexicon. And there’s also something vaguely jazzy about the way she often sings around a melody, like a raven circling in on its prey, soaring with a beauty that’s both devastating and enchanting, gliding from note to note with a natural grace that seems less learned than uncannily congenital.
     Like Waits, Holland is simply too mercurial to pin down neatly. If she were a painter — and she did indeed create the artwork that adorns her new Anti- release Pint of Blood — she might well be considered an “outsider” artist, although she did make small strides toward a kind of slanted and enchanted accessibility when she brought producer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily on board for her 2008 album The Living and the Dead.
     Holland’s productive partnership with Ismaily remains intact on Pint of Blood. And the disc’s opening track, the mid-tempo, plaintive, and touchingly twangy “All Those Girls,” creates the immediate impression that they’re picking up right where they left off in 2008, edging ever closer toward the accessible without ironing out too many of Holland’s captivating kinks. Against a country folk backdrop of strummed acoustic guitar, a softly swinging backbeat, and the heavily reverbed distortion of an electric guitar that threatens but never quite delivers discord, Holland’s voice quivers and quakes as if she can’t quite get her mouth around the words. Sounding like a less buttoned down, more adventurous Lucinda Williams, Holland imbues the song’s signature lyric — “I can’t believe you treated me like all those girls/All those sweet girls/Go home to cry/And wonder why” — with a kind of world-weary defiance. She’s certainly mastered Williams’ gift for turning vulnerability into an alluring asset, for bearing emotional scars as a sign of inner strength.
     The disc picks up some steam with the harder-hitting “Remember,” another countrified rocker with a bit more of a bounce to it than “All Those Girls.” Holland sings the first verse so steely sweet that the pleasure she takes in the implicit violence of the song’s narrative is amplified. “It brings a smile to my lips,” she unabashedly admits, “When I think of your fist/Narrowing in on and cracking his ribs.” It’s a track that plays to all of Holland’s considerable talents — her penchant for poetic turns of verse (“Mockingbirds sing at the moon/And the stars fall from the sky/If you don’t catch me when I fall for you/I’m gonna have to remember how to fly”); her uncanny ability to project an aura of toughness even as, in desperation, she croons “Can I stay here ’til dawn?/I don’t know how to get home/My phone is broken and my friends are gone/Can I stay here ’til dawn?”; and the unadulterated, un-pitch-corrected pleasure of her slurred delivery.
     “Remember” is the album’s real knockout punch, and Holland was smart to frontload Pint of Blood with two of her most immediate and affecting songs to date. Like good pick-up lines, they lure listeners into what one might call the more challenging side of Jolie Holland. “Tender Mirror” is an almost painfully spare broken-hearted piano ballad; on the acoustic “June” she says more with her screechy violin than with her softly sung verse. And, yet, there are plenty of other high points here. The heartbreak of the aptly named “Wreckage” (“If disappointment were like a drug/I overdosed again”) is offset by an almost upbeat handclapped rhythm and jauntily strummed acoustic guitar.
      Holland revisits “Littlest Birds,” a song she wrote when she was briefly part of the Canadian folk trio the Be Good Tanyas and included on her first solo disc, and reimagines it as a Rickie Lee Jones-style jazz-pop number. And she closes the album with a hymn-like cover of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s mournful “Rex’s Blues” that brings to mind what Jeff Buckley once did with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” In fact, given her roots, perhaps Holland is best described as her own kind of Texas troubadour.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/the_slanted_enchantments_of_jolie_hollands_pint_of_blood

FLEET FOXES

Music review: The rousing retro-folk of Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues

By The Burg Staff on May. 18, 2011
By Matt Ashare

For all the grousing and grimacing over the deleterious impact digital technology has had on the music industry (i.e., on major music labels), the same cannot be said for the effect it’s had on music itself. Beginning with the introduction of CDs in the late ’80s, the move to digital precipitated a veritable deluge of hard-to-find, out-of-print, and just plain obscure releases by a bevy of odd artists whose work is now not much harder to find online than the latest Lady Gaga remix.
     In fact, over the past dozen years, the rediscovery of lost recordings by late-’60s/early-’70s singer-songwriters like Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill, and Jeff Buckley’s father Tim Buckley, has helped catalyze the emergence of the so-called “freak-folk” movement, a loosely bound underground that includes Baltimore’s Animal Collective and all its various spin-offs, Detroit singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, and the California songstress Joanna Newsom. (Incidentally, I prefer the designation “avant-folk,” given the often experimental nature of “freak-folk,” but apparently I’ve been out-voted.)
     Until now, this indie offshoot hasn’t produced a true Billboard-charting breakthrough on par with the Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs or even the Decemberists’ more recent The King Is Dead. But with Fleet Foxes gearing up for an American and European tour to support their new Helplessness Blues, that may soon change, in part because the Seattle-via-Portland sixsome have crafted an album that, even at its most extreme, is only guardedly avant.
It was a rich knowledge of folk-rock history, reflected in the fingerpicked guitars, flawless vocal harmonizing, and hints of Harvest-era Neil Young on Fleet Foxes, the band’s hushed 2008 full-length debut, that gained the group acceptance among freak folkies and led to singer-guitarist Robin Pecknold touring with Joanna Newsom in 2009.
     That jaunt kickstarted Pecknold’s songwriting for Helplessness Blues, and may explain why, despite the addition of a crafty sixth member — multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson — much of the album retains the pastoral, stripped-down sensibility of Fleet Foxes, particularly the muted “Blue Spotted Tail,” with its single acoustic guitar and close-mic’ed vocal track, and the more strongly sung and strummed, drum-less album closer “Someone You’d Admire.” But Henderson’s impact on a group that includes guitarist Skyler Skjelset, drummer Josh Tillman, bassist Christian Wargo, and keyboardist Casey Wescott, offers Pecknold the opportunity to broaden Fleet Foxes’ folk-rock palette, and he takes full advantage.
     Acoustic guitars still dominate, and those sterling, sometimes choir-like harmonies that at various times bring to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash (the pounding opener “Battery Kinzie”) and early Simon & Garfunkel (the airy epic “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”) remain central to Fleet Foxes’ appeal. Yet a vaguely Eastern-sounding violin accents the swooning “Bedouin Dress,” hammered dulcimer makes an appearance in the fast-picked “The Cascades,” and pedal steel slides accentuate the comfortable countrified clutter of “Grown Ocean.”
     Pecknold can occasionally be too preciously poetic for my tastes — “I slept through July while you made lines in the heather” (“Lorelai”) is a bit much. But his growing command of folk idioms serves him well, especially on the disc’s centerpiece, the yearning, rousing title track “Helplessness Blues,” a sprawling strum-along number with lyrics that recall early Dylan. “And now after some thinking,” he sings, “I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” Don’t look now, Robin, but you already are.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_the_rousing_retro-folk_of_fleet_foxes_helplessness_blues
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for the Boston Phoenix.