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Music CD - Leonard Cohen: Songs from a Room
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Music CD: Songs from a Room
Artist: Leonard Cohen
List Price: $11.98
Our Price: $6.93
Your Save: $ 5.05 ( 42% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Sony Legacy
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Tracks:
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1. Bird on the Wire
2. Story Of Issac
3. A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes
4. The Partisan
5. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy
6. The Old Revolution
7. The Butcher
8. You Know Who I Am
9. Lady Midnight
10. Tonight Will Be Fine
11. Like A Bird (Bird On A Wire)
12. Nothing To One (You Know Who I Am)
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0886970474023
Format: Extra tracks
Label: Sony Legacy
Manufacturer: Sony Legacy
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Sony Legacy
Release Date: 2007-04-24
Studio: Sony Legacy
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Songs from a Room
Comment: Songs from a Room being Cohens 1969 and his second record over all. Cohen writes with conviction and his vocals are impeccabale. What I love about Cohen is that one believes what he sings about. The Story of Isaac is a great track which harkens back to the old testament in a very subtle and well done way. The Partisan is a great track that talks about World War 2. This song is not written by Cohen but he does a great rendition of it. The book-let is very odd. On the cover we get a photo of a pensive looking Cohen. It contains no lyrics and not other pictures. The picture on the back is a very strange one of woman with a typewriter. This is truly a classic record and should not be missed. 5/5!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Into This Furnace I Ask You Now to Venture
Comment: The first time I heard this, a friend of mine played side B of the LP. I fought in the Old Revolution. Of course, we were very young, and we thought that we were winning. I can't pretend, I still feel very much like singing, as they carried the bodies away. I wish I could find the words to tell what this music meant to me, back then, in the day. Cohen was clearly an alchemist looking for a chemical marriage, an ancient starry-eyed pilgrim, a mystical gnostic. He had been down the river, and he was back with guidance for the rest of us tenderfeet who had already experienced sandbars and snags and were desperately confused about just what was going on. Over the years I have found that I prefer different songs now than I used to. The Partisan, even though he didn't compose it, fits in well with his overall ouvre. You know, he is just brutally frank. Like a beast with it's horns he has torn every one who has reached out to him.Cohen never struck me as really all that modern in his sensibilities. He evokes European cabarets, cigarette smoke and absinthe. He reminds me of Kurt Weill, Bertholt Brecht, Edith Piaf. His music is ghostly, from another time, mixing metaphors from many peripatetic traditions; somethig old and borrowed and blue. Bhagavan Das tells the story, in his autobiography, of how it was Leonard Cohen, in Crete, who put the idea into his head to run away to India..."If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." -- Bokonon
Customer Rating:
Summary: New Tour, New Ears for an Old Album
Comment: Seems fitting that a day before the first Cohen tour in 15 years was announced today that I randomly heard A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes on my iPod. That sent me home to listen to the whole Songs from a Room CD, something I hadn't done in at least 15 years. It's always been overlooked a bit, I think, wedged as it was between his debut and the new direction (for then) and very dark Songs of Love and Hate. It's also under-represented on Essential Leonard Cohen, with only Bird on a Wire and The Partisan included.
Leonard has always been late night listening and never more than here. The vocals are mostly quiet, low-key, and -- for Leonard -- more on key than not. The arrangements are equally simple. And the mood, despite five songs of revolution and other violence, is consistently introspective. Even in those five, the lyric sings of individuals, Issac facing his father's knife, the quarreling heroes, the partisans who die alone to protect the cause.
There are a handful of songs here that don't really engage me -- Isaac has always been way too biblical for my taste and The Butcher and You Know Who I Am (the latter in both versions) just drag. But the rest is a beautiful mix of memory. loss and (in the perfect Tonight Will Be Fine) acceptance of both. Today I feel like cuts 3-6, highlighted with Seems So Long Ago, Nancy, are as good a set of four consecutive cuts as Leonard ever put on record.
Songs from a Room is nearly forty years old, old enough for me to think it may be ageless.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Difficult to Love and Well Worth the Effort
Comment: This album is dry as bones and lean as a desert. It is the first Cohen album I owned -- on vinyl -- and it took me a while to latch on to it. But it was so worth it. Every passing year I seem to love it more.
"Story of Isaac" was the first thing to hook me; it is almost a chimera of two songs that are not closely related -- a biblical story from the point of view of the boy about to be sacrificed, and an antiwar song that recognizes the violence in all of us -- but they set each other off well.
It seems wrong to blather on and on about an album that is beautiful because it is so spare. When you look up the word "plaintive" in the dictionary there should be an illustration of this album cover. I hope the new remixes don't run over that austerity. This is music that gives you space to breath, and think, instead of pounding you over the head with mindless sound. I have the earlier CD, and when I play it I find myself missing the vinyl crackles.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Half a great album.
Comment: I guess that most artsits would be lucky to create an album like Songs from a Room; It's half a masterpiece, and most musicains have never even recorded an eighth of one. Of course, Leonard Cohen isn't "most musicians." He's made some of the greatest music of his generation, works that, at their best, rival those of Bob Dylan in terms of sheer poetic vertuosity. Seen in that light, Songs from a Room isn't a great album. Certainly, it's a very good one, a record with plenty of great songs and musical moments. There are cutting lyrical insights here, and several subtly beautiful melodies. Unfortunatly, there are also far too many uninspired songs and uninteresting musical ideas to call this a great album.
The best songs here demonstrate Cohen's unique songwriting abilities: the chilling "Story of Isaac" is a tense, nightmarish study of generational friction and self sacrifice. Cohen's lyrics are bitter, bruised, and full of genuine menace. In the song's spine-tingling conclusion, Cohen spits: "When it all comes down to dust/ I will kill you if I must/ I will help you if I can," brilliantly summarizing a bleak but deeply felt view of human nature. "The Butcher" runs along similar lines; with its brutally simple guitar chords and stark lyrical imagery, the song conveys the feeling of bitter disilousionment with startling accuracy. "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is as haunting as it is beautiful. Its ghostly, spare melody is the ideal framing device for Cohen's brittle, regretful lyrics- it's a song full of painful memories and quiet loss. Interestingly, one of the best songs here wasn't even written by Cohen- "The Partisan" is a cover of a World War II era ballad that tells the story of a member of the French Resistance. Cohen's performance smolders with quiet, but undeniably present, tension, his voice electric with barely subdued nervous energy.
But not every song on the album is as good as these four- "A Bunch of Lonesome Heros" could have been an excellent song, but its gorgeously dramatic melody is buried under an incredibly unpleasant production, which bathes the music in echo and odd backing instruments. The half-formed lyrics don't help much, either. "You Know Who I Am" matches a convoluted guitar line with some incredibly pretentious lyrics ("I am the distance you put between/ all of the moments that we will be"), and "Tonight Will Be Fine,' despite being bouncy and jaunty, is completely joyless. Cohen's whistling during the final verse is just plain annoying. "The Old Revolution" and "Lady Midnight" are only halfway interesting in terms of lyrics and melody, and each one fails to leave a lasting impression. Finally, there's "Bird on a Wire." Although it's probably the most well-known (and perhaps well-liked) track on this album, I honestly think that it's the weakest song here. Cohen's performance is annoyingly melodramatic, full of painful high notes (a poor attempt to cover up the lack of genuine emotion in the man's voice). The music itself is overly sweet and completely inconsequential: the guitar line is a dull, mumbling cliche, and it's augmented by an equally worthless string section. The lyrics are direct but half-baked. Although the first few lines ("Like a bird on the wire/ like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried. in my way/ to be free") are genuinly poetic, they're counterbalanced by some of Cohen's most insufferably over-earnest declerations ("I will make it all up to thee," he sings, has voice raspy and insincere).
So, that leaves us with an album that, at its best moments, is as powerful and transcendant as anything Cohen has ever written. But at its worst...
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