Recommendations of the Editorial team
The subject of Cohen’s burning reflections is of course clearly described in the title: songs about love and hate, those Siamese twins that no human being can, let alone should, separate. Anyone who tried was bound to fail, then as now. I say that with all due respect, because the battle for women and reason ultimately provides the most beautiful motives for suffering and darkness. But it’s tiring.
Even the cover of the LP is frightening. Cohen looks like a cornered lunatic. He smiles, but the fact that the singer was still in a morass of drugs and alcohol at the time fits the otherworldly image. Not all listeners wanted or could empathize with the harsh atmosphere. When the record was released in 1971, Leonard Cohen was derided by the music press as a “bard from the one-room apartment” for these eight songs and was not only considered by the refugees as the composer for the few minutes before the last shot.
Suffer more beautifully
Maybe this labyrinth of religion and guns was and is just too difficult to decipher. Despite endless conversations with the poet, the notorious Cohen follower (and biographer) Christoph Graf has not yet made it.
So read to understand the picture from the picture. Or also: An artist is only a good artist if he exaggerates. A premise that Cohen of course fulfilled: “Well I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul/ When I am not this hunchback that you see, I sleep beneath the golden hill/ You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn, learn to serve me well.” The song is called “Avalanche,” and you can put it more modestly. Luckily, Cohen doesn’t dwell on the simple. Suffer better, the first.
But the whole thing only becomes truly extraordinary in the indescribable “Dress Rehearsal Rag”. It’s like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, but Cohen has not mutated into an insect, but has suddenly become inextricably tied to his own wretchedness. A swansong, and the singer is not at all on track: “Four o’clock in the afternoon and I didn’t feel like very much/ I said to myself, “Where are you golden boy, where is your famous golden touch?”/ (..)/ Just take a look at your body now, there’s nothing much to save/ And a bitter voice in the mirror cries, Hey, Prince, you need a shave.” And then comes the most incredible verse ever heard on a record: “Don’t drink from that cup/ It’s all caked and cracked along the rim/ That’s not electric light, my friend/ That is your vision growing dim.”
This seedy atmosphere is reinforced by Paul Buckmaster’s string arrangements. Unlike the previous two albums, this time Cohen placed more emphasis on rough, yet more emphatic instrumentation.
Better not to listen at night!
And his songwriting may never be as good again as on “Love And Hate”. “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which Cohen later enjoyed playing live, could have been a hit. The not good singer Leo Sayer turned the melody into a piece called “When I Need You” and promptly had his first and greatest success. Let’s sing another song boys, this one has grown old and bitter.
A record that starts the morning underground and doesn’t even want to come into the light. It’s better not to hear them at night, because at night the sensual demimonde rules and makes everything even more opaque. A record that replaced hundreds of experiences and has never been surpassed in terms of intensity and morbid madness. Anyone who agreed to it experienced a terrible miracle.
