Without a doubt this is Cohen's darkest, most ambitious & quite possibly most depressing record. I think he inadvertently created a whole new genre here---Death Folk. Self proclaimed fans range from Kurt Cobain to Nick Cave. So, if you're looking for the flower child nostalgia of of "Suzanne", proceed immediately to the latest greatest hits collection.

"Avalanche" definitely veers on the hate side of things. Lyrically speaking, it's like stumbling across Richard The Third in an abandoned mineshaft. Toss in some stark, flamenco guitar & you get the picture. A dark start to a creepy, often disturbing album.

"Last Year's Man" is a fitting tribute to any old Casanova whose seen his 15 minutes come & go. The only thing missing here is a knout & a hairshirt. On "Dress Rehearsal Rag", the whole song reeks of dried blood, bandages & transient hotels. The only real upbeat number is, "Diamonds In The Mine", where he sings like he just gargled with Drano.

"Love Calls Your Name" has to be one of Cohen's most epic & underated ballads, while "Famous Blue Raincoat" is one of his more well known. It's certainly the only song off here ever included on a Best Of.

The purvasive atmosphere of jaded sarcasm comes to a fore with, "Sing Another Song, Boys" & by the time he gets to "Joan Of Arc" you'll be reaching for ABBA's GREATEST HITS.

Pretentious, cynical & pissed off---this is the sound of Cohen strumming his six-string with an open vein. He's never done anything like it, before or since. I suppose only Lou Reed's BERLIN comes close.

Leonard Cohen has been described as the poet of existential despair, and none of his several vintage albums is more edgy and desperate than this thirty year old offering with its white on black lettering and stark unshaven images of a man on the very verge of madness. On the back cover of the original album was large block-lettered script reading " They locked up a man/Who wanted to rule the world/ The fools/ They locked up the wrong man". Ah, such saintly pretensions! Yet Cohen is mad like a fox, cleverly setting his snares for those fools who don't recognize his own magnetic powers, charisma, and outright poetic genius. In "Avalanche" he sets the first proper insane tone, carefully evoking his curious blend of old world images and slamming them against contradictory notions like sexy religiosity, employing profoundly arcane symbols alongside profane contemporary longings.

He continues his mad mystic pounding on the door of his inner longings with "Last Year's Man". His own comment on the song is that he always waits for the children's chorus. It and he are both haunting here, his use of old testament language powerfully drawing a word picture that leaves one gasping for air. "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is an ironic improvisation of an old poem from the "Spice Box of Earth" book he first published in the late 1950s, while "Love Calls You By Your Name" is another evocative and mysterious display of his amazing poetic genius put to good musical use. I have always loved "Famous Blue Raincoat", a long and revealing tale of a man writing to a old friend who cuckolded him with his wife, filling him in on his own feelings, perceptions, and surprising take on the affair. It is hard to describe "Joan Of Arc", except to say she is an emblematic figure to Cohen, a kind of sexy virgin, a saintly vixen, a womanly icon embodying both the purity and prurience of the world in a single ethereal figure. Of course he wants to bed her. Cohen is nothing if not hypnotically suggestive, and he takes one on a mind's ride that makes you want to either jump off a bridge or scream in delight. This is a superb album by a consummate artist, whose voice and style fit his evocative message like a well-worn leather glove. Black on black, of course. Enjoy!

Like all Cohen's early albums, Songs Of Love & Hate has grown in stature down the decades. Famous Blue Raincoat was beautifully covered by Jennifer Warnes on her album of the same name which also contains a duet with Cohen on a longer version of Joan Of Arc. Sing Another Song Boys is Cohen at his bitter best, its harsh chorus atypical of the image of the subdued folkie but pointing to later songs like Lover Lover Lover on 1974's New Skin For The Old Ceremony. Diamonds In The Mine is in the same vein, where the celestial female vocals are particularly effective in balancing Cohen's raw voice on this tale of stunning imagery. (In retrospect, in tone and delivery these two songs are not too far removed from tracks like Iodine or Paper-Thin Hotel on his much-criticized Phil Spector produced album Death Of A Ladies Man). Besides those to, the other track are typical early Cohen. With astonishing elegance and simplicity, the haunting melodies, poetic lyrics and ragged voice have a way of establishing themselves in the consciousness of the listener. Few other artists touch the strings of the soul in the way that Cohen does. Perhaps Richard Thompson comes close now and again, as do Nick Drake, Lou Reed on Berlin, Nick Cave and definitely Swans and Angels Of Light. "Love and Hate" is another jewel in Cohen's crown of ageless music.

This is perhaps Leonard Cohen's greatest album. And for any artist with a catalog as rich, as rewarding, as intoxicating, and as deep as Leonard Cohen's, that's is a high compliment indeed. Every single song here is absolutely great. As incredible as Cohen's first two albums were (particularly the classic debut), this third effort is leaps and bounds above both of them. Cohen had clearly grown as a songwriter. Notice the deeper, more meaningful, more emotionally intense lyrics. Notice the more complex (lyrically and musically) and longer songs overall. Notice, even, how much Cohen had improved as a singer. While I never found his voice to be as bad as many do, his "sweet monotone" enunciates more clearly his poetry than it did before. And speaking of poetry, this blew away everything that he wrote before (not to mention what other people had written), and still stands as some of his finest. The music had grown in scope as well. Whereas the first two albums ran slightly monotonous by record's end with their nearly non-varying musical backing, Songs of Love and Hate is musically diverse. It's apparent from the first song, the masterpiece Avalanche, that Cohen has something more musically ambitious in store for us here, and the entire album pervades with alternate guitar stylings, orchestrations, backing vocals, sound effects, and more. There are deep, harrowing songs on this album of the likes that Cohen had never done before (and has really never done since); for example, the aforementioned masterpiece Avalanche (covered by Nick Cave), the harshly self-flaggelating Dress Rehearsal Rag, and the oft-overlooked excellent track, Sing Another Song, Boys. Last Year's Man seems to address the darker side of art. Diamons In The Mine is a great song as well, and Love Calls You By Your Name is a classic. Famous Blue Raincoat is the classic written in the form of a letter. Joan of Arc is one of the best examples of Cohen's poetry. These songs and this album are absolute masterpieces; there's no other way of putting it. Buy it today; your music collection is simply not complete without it.

Leonard Cohen's third album is Emo before Emo music, or rather the original example of masterful, subdued, confessional songwriting. It is a spiritual precursor to the works of Roger Waters, Kurt Cobain, and Trent Reznor, except with three measures of subtlety for each measure of rage. In "Last Year's Man," the Canadian poet uses only abstract symbolism to reflect upon a love affair with a woman who had many other lovers, (I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the dark/ One-by-one she had to tell them that her name was Joan of Arc/ I was in that army, yes I stayed a little while) yet perfectly conveys the awkwardness of the situation, his regret, and his lingering admiration of the woman's refreshingly anti-feminine militarism. This trick of telling an entire story by jumping into the middle of it is repeated in "Famous Blue Raincoat", written in the form of a forgiving letter to an old friend who convinced the narrator's wife to leave him, before abandoning her himself. The narrator's sadness becomes palpable to the listener precisely because he is trying so hard not to express it, yet feels compelled to address issues from which has has never emotionally recovered.

This album possesses the dark, elaborate quality characteristic of the catalog of Tori Amos, who covered Famous Blue Raincaot, and with the originality of Leonard's work, it is unsurprising to discover how widely influential it has been to subsequent artists. And yet Leonard's work, and this album in particular, possess a brand of originality that is Promethian. Leonard speaks as a demigod, giving to mankind an image of itself more terrifyingly accurate than mankind's self-portrait. Leonard doesn't really create at all; He shows what has always existed within the human heart, and leaves his listeners wondering why they couldn't see it without his illumination.

A strict, consistent code of signs and symbols dominates the lyrical narrative of the album: Joan of Arc as the the tendency to escape vulnerability by championing dominance, the cripple as the person who has lost sexual empowerment, perhaps through direct adoration ironically impacting lovers as egregious, fire as the arbitrary melodrama we employ to resist the simplicity of affection. It is poetry about postmodern predicaments, which escapes the disempassioned drabness of postmodern literature by adhering temerously to romantic conventions. Unlike the beat poets and more mainstream folk singers of his era (Dylan et al.), Cohen's sentimentality is expressed rather than assumed. There is no glorification of the fashionable profundity of drug use, aimless traveling, or use of fashion or pop-culture cantrips to make his narrators accessible. The accesibility comes from his concern for interpersonal solidarity, and the universal emotions stigmatized by society and (at least in 1971) absent in commercial music. Many so-called "emotional" bands of today would do well to take a page from his literary, reason-tempered songbook.