Customer Reviews

More Best of

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this as my first Leonard Cohen after hearing Everybody Knows on a local station - I love every song on the CD, and the arrangements are just beautiful! Skip Greatest Hits and go directly to this one...

Leonard Cohens "more best of" caught my attention at a very painful time in my life(my husbands death) ... after 9 months ...I carry the CD with me, and have given several to friends.. his wonderful voice and poignant ,acid lyrics are lifting me out of the blackest hour of my soul.

What poetic genius blended with melodies so poignant to my hungry ears! This is the ultimate in the sinful indulgence of lyricism ~ I love this album! It dances me to the end of love - It's where I go to cry - I can take this where love's never been - and there it would sprout from the rich soil of Leonard Cohen's verse and voice an amazing tree of the delectable forbidden fruit!

Personally, I couldn't deal with this little amount of Leonard Cohen myself, and would get his 2-disc "Essential" collection first. However, if you're looking for a single disc of hits, here you go. I actually like "More Best Of" even more than his previous "Best Of", because I'm a fan of his "deeper voice" years, and this is what you get here. Obviously the songs are tops as well. Most of his late 80's and early 90's stuff is included. "Everybody Knows", "I'm Your Man", "Tower Of Song", and "The Future". Of course at just 13 tracks this misses alot, but mostly I miss "Waiting For The Miracle" (get Essential Cohen). Anyway, this is a great starting point for the casual fan, and is wonderful music for early mornings, right on thru to "Closing Time".

I have never heard such music before--it is almost indescribable. "Closing Time" dredges up old memories that overflow. "Dance Me to the end of Love" will take you out of your skull if you possess any romance in your blood and "Take This Waltz" with its incredible score and blow-your-mind lyrics --what can I say? "Hallelujah" envisions Old Testament emotions. The music of Leonard Cohen will blow you away if you have never heard it before. I know.

Leonard Cohen in his particular mood , lets you mesmerized . The best song in my opinion in this well selected collection is Dance me to the end of love , with great lyrics and greek echoes . There another winner songs like Everybody knows and Suzanne ; Democracy is powerful too .
Cohen 's style is unique . His voice in a ultralow frequency works out as another instrument ; very expressive and warmth .
Since I got this issue in 1999 I heard it at least once every month .
High creative level , expressiveness , musicality and originality .

It just soothes the mind to know that this exists in some corner of the universe. That deep voice could tame a lion in mating season, a truly wonderful piece of work.

Cohen is a master, deeply connected to fundamental human truths and a damn good songwriter. This is a fairly good summary of his later albumns but you'd do better to buy an album that wasn't "best of." I recommend "Various Positions" or the live album of the ones covered in this collection. Of the two previously unreleased songs, "Never any Good" is a sortof eulogy but not particularly good for Cohen. "The Great Event," on the other hand, is striking and scary, featuring a synthesized, computerlike voice merging with a grave-like Cohen's, giving his playful and prophetic vision of the coming destruction and rebirth of our world.

This is my first in-depth experience with Leonard Cohen, so you who are accustomed to his work will have to forgive my naive enthusiasm. I have never heard anything so serious in my life. The best comparison that I can come up with is that this artist combines the intellect of Bob Dylan with the delivery of Marianne Faithfull. This is poetry; it is bleak, it is depressing, it is horrifying, it is humorous, it is beautiful. Any thinking person needs to hear this. Actually a lot more people need to hear it, but unfortunately I believe that the very ones who need to hear it are the ones who will choose to ignore it.

The tracks cover a wide (to put it mildly) range of topics done in a variety of musical styles, difficult to describe. "Everybody Knows" is a pretty accurate view of our corrupt society, delivered in an appropriately cynical voice accompanied by appropriately sinister music. "Tower of Song" is more personal, seemingly about someone who is imprisoned by his circumstances. The music, including the backup singing, sounds lighter, perhaps because the victim has accepted his fate. Another personal song, "Suzanne", is the one I was most familiar with before buying this CD. A straight-up folk song, it weaves sex, religion and social issues together to form an unforgettable portrait of a girl who is "...half crazy/but that's why you want to be there." (The funny thing is, hearing this song again reminds me of a girl I knew very well by the same name, so, Suzanne, if you are reading this, you know who you are!) Black humor is in full force as "Democracy" comes to the USA, to the tune of a military march. And you know "The Future" will be grim if the singer prefers the near past and the present (crack, the Berlin Wall, Stalin, Hiroshima) to the worse future he describes as "murder". The finality of the reality eventually arrives in "Closing Time", a mid-tempo square-dance country number which contains still more black humor: "And the whole damn place goes crazy twice/and it's once for the Devil and it's once for Christ/but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights - we're busted in the blinding lights/of closing time." I'd say that's pretty final. Ah, but the disc ends with a spoken ray of hope, in which playing the Moonlight Sonata backwards will somehow have enough power to "...end the horror...end the sorrow...and assert the majesty of creation!"

People, you just don't find much music like this on the radio or on MTV and VH1. I am happy to have stumbled upon it through a series of odd coincidences, as if it were meant to be. I know now that having heard it, I can't do without it.

Though Leonard Cohen is definitely a lyrical and poetic genius, I hope no customers are swayed to buy this CD because of Jeff Buckley's brilliant cover of "Hallelujah". If you are expecting to find Buckley's sound in Cohen's work, your new purchase may be a bitter pill for you to swallow. I must admit that Cohen's lyrics are some of the most powerful and magical words I have ever heard uttered. This is where the 5 stars come in. For those that were moved greatly by Buckley's rendition of "Hallelujah", I recommend Leonard Cohen's lyrics, poetry, and literature.