New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a masterpiece, and one of Leonard Cohen's best albums. It's a truly great effort, and too often overlooked. Although his first three albums - particularly the first and third - are all certified masterpieces, this one, his fourth, was his first attempt to move beyond them in scope. Incorporating background vocalists and a wider array of instrumentation than he employed on those sparse first three efforts, Cohen creates here an album broader, more epic in scope than its predecessors. He also began, for the first time, to lighten up on the subject matter of his lyrics: incorporating some - albeit rather dark - humor into several of the songs here, Cohen creates an album - which, along with its broader musical pallette - that is a much easier listen this his first three, which were at times so depressing as to lend themselves to the status of "mood" albums. That said, Cohen is Cohen, and his themes remain the same; he has a lighter touch here at times, is all. Although the opening track, Is This What You Wanted?, features lyrics like "You were K.Y. Jelly/I was Vaseline" much of the rest of the album is pervaded with a deep and dark sense of self-loathing: Cohen places himself on a pedastal and de-construcs his persona as he did on "Avalanche", but in a much less abstract, far more direct and disturbing way. Cohen at this time was going through a period of extreme personal depression and writer's block (which would culminate in the Phil Spector collaboration on Death of A Ladies' Man), and songs such as Field Commander Cohen and A Singer Must Die attest to his state of mind at the time. A deep, dark, driving masterpiece with just the right amount of light touch, New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a great album, and an essential purchase for any admirer of Leonard Cohen.

Full of detached intimacy, this album is superior for Cohen or any other artist. Blending his poetry with offbeat, almost tribal-sounding instruments brings out the primitive feelings of lost affairs, love, and even the sounds of war. Simply beautiful.

"You were Marlon Brando, I was Steve McQueen/You were K.Y. Jelly, I was Vaseline/You were the father of modern medicine, I was Mr. Clean/You where the (...) and the beast of Babylon, I was Rin Tin Tin," Leonard Cohen sings on "Is This What You Wanted," a song that displays the much-needed dose of humor added to his lyrical exercises in regret and self-depreciation on his fourth album, 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony. New Skin's more varied instrumentation, looser vocal approach and added wit make it Cohen's best album yet. Although he was always a finely skilled and richly tender poet, one could only endure so much of Cohen's earlier albums as spirit-stomping and disheartened as they were. Although the main subject matter of New Skin is still grief, Cohen confronts life's tragedies with a different approach. He abandons the mournful wailing of songs like "Bird on a Wire" or "Stories of the Street" and the somber expressions of "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" or "The Stranger Song" and dons a type of charisma, classified somewhere between crooner and beatnik, and stands in a mock-confrontational pose, challenging both the complicated nature of society ("A Singer Must Die," "Field Commander Cohen," "There is a War") and distressing predicaments with another cast of abusive, self-destructive, yet intoxicating women ("I Tried to Leave You," "Chelsea Hotel #2," "Leaving Green Sleeves") with a fistful of clever irony and satire. Cohen's tongue being placed in his cheek does not, however, equal the complete loss of the intimate, folk rock beauty of his music. "Who by the Fire" is as striking, moving and poignant any song the man has written and "Take This Longing" is one of his most ardent, elegantly expressed requests. Generally, the album keeps the solemn and dignified air of Cohen's previous works. Its added whimsical flair only makes his music more entertaining and invigorating.

There may be better songs by Leonard Cohen and others, but there is no better lyric than "is this what you wanted to live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?" Chelsea Hotel #2 is just about the best song there is, and Greensleeves shows how to take a song and blend in new lyrics.

If I was forced to take only one folk cd from the 70s with me to some deserted corner of the universe this would be the one ( sorry Nick Drake fans). If you are a fan of the fushion of lyric with song, Cohen ( like Dylan in the 60's) is your man. And it's not just the combination of primitive backround beats melding with oddly unique, often self-deprecating comical arrangements, but his use of metaphor is so highly polished as make the poet in all of us stand up and shout "bravo!"

Cohen is at his best telling the intimate story of two tortured people meandering through a flurry of passions: infuriating anger and desperation, tenderness and erotic pleasure, all linked to the irony of a self-relaized, sometimes self-deprecating humor as in "Is This What You Wanted," "Chelsea Hotel #2" ( co-starring Janis Joplin), "There is a War," and "Leaving Greensleeves." These are songs chock-full of the some of the most remarkable metaphors anywhere in music. They can be read on many many levels, and this is the kind of lyric the soul loves the best. It gets right to the complexity and contradictions of the emotions in all of us. Yep. Right up to its smelly little source.

Cohen keeps this same tap flowing in other ballads as well: "Who by Fire" with is comical metaphors to the numberless ways to die, to "Lover, Lover, Lover," a tender song really, a desperate anthem to the power of love over the carnage it can leave behind.

Then there is this other Cohen...the "dirty little boy" in Field Commander Cohen" and the remarkable "A Singer Must Die." All attempts to tame or control this wild revolutionary son, either by the creeds of society or relationship, is doomed to abject failure. Cohen, swallowed whole by the insight to cut through all that nonsense, and armed with an insistent sense of poetic truth, is, as always, unrepentent.

Then there is this sweeter Cohen; "I Tried to Leave You," and the superlative "Take This Longing," reveals two very different tender events...one revolving around a tired long term relationship where love is the only thing left ( a real juxtaposition of most common day love songs is which love is the only thing NOT left), and the other centered on a realization of what a man ( or woman for that matter) wants to experience over and over again in the beauty of a lover's body and soul. "Take This Longing" is one of the most tender ballads ever penned.

Cohen is not for everyone. Some of us just simply don't have the depth or experience to know the places he has revealed. But if you allow him, Cohen takes the young lyricist or poet to a place that is a clinic for good writing, and the rest of us just to the clinic of the soul, unfettered by shallowness or the stock "literalism" of the emotions that phychologists like James Hillman say prevent us from developing our souls. Cohen in "New Skin" takes us into some very dark "unliteral" places so that we all may find a "New Skin" for our souls out of the chaos of shattered and conflicting emotions in which love and intelligence brings us to new realizations.