Leonard Cohen: Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour - review

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Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour

(Sony)

The cynic wonders whether the amount of concert recordings Leonard Cohen has released recently is related to the financial woes that prompted his return to the stage in 2008.

Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour is his fourth live album in six years. It opens with "Field Commander Cohen", a wittily jaundiced self-portrait as "the patron saint of envy and grocer of despair/Working for the Yankee dollar". But the music is jaunty and Cohen's tone typically ironic. No such material grubbiness, we are led to understand, taints the album itself.

Recorded during his "Old Ideas" world tour, it turns out to be a nice memento of an outstanding experience. Excellent sound quality captures the graceful lilt of Cohen's backing band and singers, a consoling wash of Spanish guitar, violin, R&B organ and soulful female choruses, all combining resplendently on an epic "Joan of Arc".

Cohen's tones are measured but leathery, age having crumbled the sumptuous voice of old. A pair of unreleased numbers, "Never Gave Nobody Touble" and "Got a Little Secret", cast him as a gravelly bluesman, a role he plays with as much relish as the mock-heroic troubadour of 1974's "Field Commander Cohen". For all his much vaunted depressiveness Cohen's outlook is essentially comic, a beacon of light amid the darkness.

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