Leonard Cohen could always wrangle a good song from a grim situation. Just one example: In 1966, he and a lover stayed in a squalid room at New York’s Penn Terminal Hotel. Everything was broken—the windows, the radiators, the taps, their relationship—but the miserable experience at least yielded “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.” Yet not even someone with Cohen’s wry humor would have guessed that, 50 years later, far bleaker circumstances would spur him into saying the most perfect goodbye imaginable. He was living with cancer when working on 2016’s You Want It Darker, and the shadow of mortality made his 14th studio album resemble a last testament. 19 days later, he fell in his home and passed away, aged 82.
Few records have sounded so heavy with finality. So it’s initially hard to know what remains to be said on Thanks For The Dance, a collection of bare-bones ideas and vocals lovingly fleshed out into finished tracks by Cohen’s son, Adam, with contributions from admirers including Beck, Feist, and The National’s Bryce Dessner. That’s not to say Cohen’s powers had waned: the elegant reckoning of the opening “Happens to the Heart” finds him still trying to untie the messy knot of sex, love, spirituality, and death with winking self-deprecation, saucy innuendo and rich religious symbolism, before finishing with a disquieting image that lingers like gun smoke: “I was handy with a rifle/ My father’s 0.303/ I fought for something final/ Not the right to disagree.” The fact that his crumbs would be most people’s banquets, though, can’t turn all the sketches into compelling songs.
This project was teased with a somber, reworked version of Cohen’s 1998 poem “The Goal” which suggested that, like … Darker, it would be dominated by his awareness of the dying light around him. “Settling at last/Accounts of the soul,” he sighs, finally putting his many affairs in order. In truth, while the other stories here are also full of old ghosts and reflections, they rarely play out as explicit confrontations with Cohen’s fate. Instead, the lead song’s soft, tinkling-glass piano and gentle acoustic guitar are more indicative of the supporting players’ penchant for classy restraint: they employ the light hands of musicians at an intimate soiree, allowing the guest of honor’s ravaged growl to hold court.
At times it works brilliantly, not least on “The Goal” itself, which is spun with the delicacy of a spiderweb. On other occasions there’s a sense of drift, a tendency for pristine arrangements to tip-toe around Cohen’s words as if fearful of intruding: although the mournful mandolin of “Moving On” makes for a pretty backdrop, it’s not the only track that’s essentially a poem recited over decorous orchestration. And while Cohen’s favorite flourishes are everywhere—the sweet, sad lilt of Javier Mas’s Spanish laud on the title cut, the Jew’s harp Beck plays on the moonlit rumble of “The Night Of Santiago”—they don’t always cut through or drive the compositions.
The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention. Some of Cohen’s greatest triumphs were risks, the result of him pairing his ever-sootier voice with different sounds: the cheap Casio keyboards that sparked his ‘80s renaissance, the haunting strings and choirs of the Adam-helmed … Darker.
Unsurprisingly, the best efforts here get closer to a similar alchemy. A mist of eerie piano and ghostly synths fogs “It’s Torn,” creating a quietly menacing score for Cohen’s vision of an unraveling world where the center cannot hold: “The opposites falter/The spirals reverse.” The jaded soul-searching of “The Hills,” meanwhile, is leavened with dry wit and the stately hum of horns and organ, as a pill-popping Cohen tries to make peace with the fact that his slog inside the Tower of Song is nearly at an end. “I know she is coming,” he insists, as his backing singers arrive to soothe his tired croak.
When everything clicks with that kind of harmony, the album becomes more than just a graceful, inessential postscript. Most startling is “Puppets,” which starts with the horrors of the Holocaust and grows into a black reflection on human nature, helplessness and inescapable cycles of violence. Rather than raging, the music is a heavenly balm—bells chime, angelic voices sing, ethereal electronics thrum with strange celestial wonder—and the effect is like seeing a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape on a stained-glass window. If Thanks For The Dance can’t one-up … Darker’s grand farewell, moments like that at least make it a worthwhile addition to his legacy.
