Going home 离家是为了回家啊

Leonard Cohen's 12th studio LP is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s.

We can trust Cohen to know: Over the past 77 years, he has, in a graceful but inevitable way, become old.

Cohen's voice has always sounded deep, flat, and naturalistic-- the kind of performance that attempts to sound like it's no performance at all.

It's easy to think of Cohen as a folksinger since "folksinger" is common shorthand for musicians who tend to privilege words over music. Cohen, though, tends to go where his musical collaborators and arrangers lead him, whether it's grimy dive-bar ballads, disco, bare-bones guitar blues, or orchestral elaborations. For a Zen monk who started his career as a poet, Leonard Cohen has used a lot of synth horns.

Old Ideas is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. Backup singers sing passionate, wordless melodies; the bass sounds like the big, upright kind.

Cohen's voice alone, though, is a gorgeous, singular instrument. It carries in it a quality that is difficult to discuss without either becoming sentimental or appealing to the misguided idea that just because you play an acoustic guitar or sing close to the microphone, what you do is more honest than someone who attempts to create an experience of truth in some other way.

节选Pitchfork