22. Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man (1988)
The album that got me into the delights of Leonard Cohen's discography, and evidently the one I listen to the most. Like with Faith No More, I'm probably in a minority of Cohen fans that prefers his later work to his earlier work. While
Songs From a Room and the aptly titled
Songs Of Leonard Cohen are both fantastic acoustic folk albums, this here's the album which struck an instant chord with me. On the face of it, the thought of Leonard Cohen aiming at a larger audience by adopting commercial production techniques into his sound is pretty cringey - look no further than
Never Let Me Down by David Bowie or
Goodbye Cruel World by Elvis Costello for an example of how disastrous such a strategy can prove to be. By sheer contrast to the efforts of his 70s singer/songwriter contemporaries though, this approach has an opposite effect, producing an absolute gem of an album and, in my opinion, the guy's masterpiece. One of the reasons for this would be reining in the electronic studio effects nicely (only in a handful of places does the record sound at all dated, and nowhere near badly enough to drag the songs into mediocrity). Another is that Cohen is quite possibly my favourite ever lyricist, and that this is arguably the finest set of lyrics ever committed to an album. Thirdly, the songwriting is sublime, providing one of the best B-sides of any record (which, in the shape of
I Can't Forget and
Tower Of Song some of the most beautifully tender songs ever). It's folk-rock taken into the 80s, and benefiting from doing so massively. If it weren't for the fact that
Ain't No Cure For Love is a bit of a turkey, this'd be top 10 stuff.
The best bits: Take This Waltz,
I Can't Forget,
Tower Of Song