Death of a Ladies Man [Import]

Death Of A Ladies' Man is an album of striking songs & tortured intensity so it will sound abrasive to some, especially those who prefer his spare style of the 1960s & later works like Recent Songs. As for the complaints about Phil Spector's production, the sound is not that far removed from tracks like Is This What You Wanted? and Lover Lover Lover on the 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony that are characterized by raw vocals & heavy rock instrumentation.

Even earlier, on 1971's Songs of Love and Hate the vocals, backing and theme of Diamonds in the Mine were anything but gentle. Why, even his 1967 debut contains the anguished track One Us Cannot Be Wrong which addresses the lover in a sequence of strange images before moving on to melodic whistling and ending with bitter shouted la la lahs.

So there definitely was a precedent for Leonard the Rocker. His own dislike of the album - he completely ignored it in compiling The Essential Leonard Cohen - probably has more to do with unpleasant recollections of the recording process, which reportedly was quite stressful, than with the actual music. There is simply nothing wrong with the melodies or the lyrics whilst the arrangements and the vocals are a matter of taste.

On tracks like the plodding drum-dominated Iodine, the highly strung Memories with its soaring vocal sections and raucous saxes & the thunderously pounding Don't Go Home his voice strains a bit against Spector's production, appropriately reflecting the sentiment of the songs. On the other hand the tuneful twirling True Love Leaves No Traces has exquisite imagery and soulful female vocals by Renee Blackley who contributes same on Iodine and Memories.

The lyrics are sheer poetry, whether uplifting as in "True loves leaves no traces/If you and I are one/It's lost in our embraces/Like stars against the sun" or bitter and acerbic as in the twisted Paper-Thin Hotel: "It's written on the walls of this hotel/You go to heaven once you've been to hell/A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I heard that love was out of my control." The harshest element in Iodine is the lyrics, not the drums or the overall sound which is rendered highly atmospheric by the other-worldly backing vocals.

In addition to True Love Leaves No Traces, other immediately appealing songs include the sensual and elegantly arranged I Left A Woman Waiting where Leonard's voice hovers between speaking and singing. The fiddle feast Fingerprints, buoyant with a lilting, propulsive beat must be one of the most catchy country songs of all time. The track The Captain on the 1984 album Various Positions was the closest Cohen came to country again.

Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg are amongst the backing vocalists on Don't Go Home With Your Hardhat, a stampede of driving rhythms, shuddering percussion, powerful piano rolls and shouted vocals. The wrath & the fury are quite deceptive as the absurd lyrics will reveal if you can hear them. By adding bombast, Meat Loaf could turn this into a hit bigger than Bat out of Hell. It was a brilliant idea to put the aforementioned Fingerprints in this strategic position between the onslaught of Don't Go Home and the solemn, sprawling dirge that follows.

Gravitas at its gravest, the weighty title track Death of a Ladies' Man has a majestic arrangement with waves of multi-layered doom-laden vocals in crescendos allowing at the ebbs a single female voice to momentarily caress Cohen's. The wall of instrumental sound acts likewise, so when waning a single instrument or hypnotic instrumental pattern comes fleetingly to the fore. With its overall drone-like ambience it is as oppressive in its atmospherics as Lou Reed's The Bells on the Street Hassle album. It also calls to mind Das Lied der Deutschen on the Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico's 1974 album The End.

The sleeve notes credit "Spector & Cohen" as composers of all songs with no further information on lyrics or music. Spector was responsible for all vocal arrangements and for rhythm arrangements on six tracks. The two exceptions are I Left A Woman Waiting & Iodine where Nino Tempo takes the credit. Phil definitely set out to recreate his famous wall of sound with seventeen backing vocalists and an arsenal of instruments that includes guitars, drums, keyboards, synth, bass, percussion, fiddle, sax, flute, trombone, trumpet, organ and vibes.

Proof of the quality of these compositions can be found on the excellent tribute album I'm Your Fan where True Love Leaves No Traces is given a breezy 1970s pop treatment by Dead Famous People & Don't Go Home With Your Hardhat is covered well enough by David McComb & Adam Peters. I loved Death of a Ladies' Man when it was released in 1978 and I appreciate it even more now. Like all of us, Cohen is allowed to shout sometimes. If he doesn't like the production, nothing stops him from re-recording some of these songs.