Songs From a Room

I've rated every single Leonard Cohen album 3 stars so far, and this album isn't moving the needle for me. A straight down the middle, nice enjoyable listen that plays well in the background. There's moments of flair that stand out, like the atmospheric guitar in The Partisan. He has some presence, and the songs hold some weight. It's very stripped back, but he sings well and the songs work. It gets a bit old after a while; I certainly wouldn't want this to be any longer.

You guessed it... 3/5!

My first two Cohen albums got one star but the two since have got a 3 so maybe he’s growing on me. I might go back to those first two and give them another go.

Is was a really solid album with a couple of crackers on it. The Partisan in particular was bloody great.

Jamais écouté avant.

Quelques notes de guitare, des ponctuations à la basse, des nappes parsemées de violon, quelques accents à la guimbarde, et au-dessus, loin au-dessus, la voix bancale de Leonard Cohen. Songs from a Room est un exercice de dépouillement musical presque extrême, conçu pour mettre en avant les sublimes textes de l'un des plus grands poètes de la folk. Et ça marche, très bien, même, à condition de se laisser embarquer dans la noire mélancolie de ses mélodies diffuses et la puissance évocatrice des mots.

Top : The Partisan
Flop : The Butcher

This was terrible. This was only my first Leonard Cohen album on the list... I can't believe I have to listen to 4 more albums of this crap

I'm thinking Leonard may have been a happier person if he'd gone outside and walked around in nature for a while. Staying in one room is not good for mental health!

So, I really like Leonard Cohen but I feel like including five albums is just lazy. Pick one from his early acoustic folk albums and one after his shift in sound. Anyway, sometimes I’m not in the mood for gloomy folk but when I am, this is great. If you are looking for more like this, check out Pearls Before Swine which came out a couple years before this. Good stuff!

It's alright, singer songwriter

that's not entertanining enough for me

cozy

I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.

It’s the fifth time we’ve gotten Leonard Cohen, and also our last. At this point, it’s pretty clear what to expect from the guy: a bit of flowery purple prose musing about morality, the military, religion, romance, and more with a penmanship that has the ability to zoom in & out like a pair of high-powered binoculars. There’s a little more of an instrumental lift here than on his debut album, but it largely reverts back to some of its more minimal guitar tones by the back half of the album, which is most of the reason I’m at a 4.5.

However, his songwriting really is just that good here, & thankfully, a bit more straightforward throughout. Yes, a few tracks are still harder to parse (namely “Lady Midnight”), but stuff like “Story of Isaac”, “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes”, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” & “Tonight Will Be Fine” are probably among the most digestible tracks he’s put to tape on the list. Occasionally, his lyrics meet the moment at times when his vocal delivery & instrumentation don’t (namely on “The Old Revolution”), but for the most part, I’d say Leonard Cohen genuinely does meet the moment here. He doesn’t have a big lift to his voice, but he knows when to push it for the moments that call for it, and his held notes do carry well.

Overall, it’s practically more of the same when it comes to Leonard Cohen. If you like him, you’ll like this. If you don’t, you probably won’t. There’s a nuance in there about how much the instrumentation needs to have a presence to really pull listeners to be more interested past just the allure of his storytelling, and I do think this slacks on it enough to be at a 4.5. For other people, that slack will lead much lower. However, I just happen to think his songwriting is that damn good & I’m not as bothered by the muted tones of this album, hence a bump up to a 5.

As far as Leonard Cohen himself goes, it’s 4.5 or 5’s across the board for me on all 5 of his albums here. “You Want It Darker” is still probably my favorite / most impactful here, but I think ranking his albums in any capacity is a bit of a fool’s errand, as they’re just not meant to be digested in that way. These are poetry books, chronicling life through the eyes of Mr. Cohen. Volume to volume, they’re all different, yet they share a worldview expressed in different ways, occasionally evolving the backing track that underlines the writing. You can rank the poems, yes, but the books themselves are just individual chapters of a man’s perspective all the way through his death. Yes, even that slightly weird ‘80s chapter where he got a bit horny. I don’t think you can rank them like that, but you can measure the impact of their totality. I think it’s a hell of a body of work to leave behind, and I certainly think I’ll be looking back at a lot of these tracks with an appreciation for his penmanship. Rest in peace, Leonard.

The songwriting here is really great as expected, but did we really need the Jaw Harp in every song? Overall I think this is weaker than his first album. Favorites were Bird On The Wire, A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes, The Partisan, and The Butcher.

Kaum Arrangement, viel Atmosphäre, reine Sprache. Bird on the Wire ist ein leiser Klassiker, The Partisan trägt eine unerwartete Schwere, und Cohens Stimme wirkt hier noch unmittelbarer als auf dem Debüt. Das Album ist weniger abwechslungsreich, aber dafür intimer, fokussierter und poetisch sehr stark.

Generator random strikes again! Two Cohen albums in 3 days.

But yeah. A slight improvement in basically every way compared to Songs of Leonard Cohen. The music is better, less boring, and a little more catchy. The vocals/lyrics stood out more for me. And he excised the psychedelic elements I didn't like. Decent album.

Another Leonard Cohen album - and to be honest, it doesn't sound exactly like the others. On “Songs From A Room,” too, he recites his poems to accompanying music, but here, at least, it seems as though the lyrics and music were conceived together to some extent.
Still, this album, too, shows first and foremost that Leonard Cohen wasn't a particularly good singer. And I still don't understand why so many of his albums are on the list.

Leonard cohen is back with his early "Evil Bob Dylan" persona. Evil may not be the right word, but he certainly takes singer-songwriter music somewhere dark and strange and biblical. I will admit that of Cohen's sublime first 3 albums, Songs From A Room is definitely the worst, but it isn't *much* worse. His striking poetry is still in full force, that's for certain. And there are some of his absolute best songs here. Bird on the Wire, Story of Isaac, The Partisan, and The Butcher in particular. Bird on the Wire is and indisputably classic, with evocative mouth harp playing. Story of Isaac is the peak of Cohen's biblical references. The Partisan (to me) conjures the sadness that I get from accounts of World War 1, I don't know why, but it just makes sense to me. And The Butcher is minimalistic in composition and burning with an undeniable fury. On some level, these songs are all jaw droppingly gorgeous, even if in a dark way. And honestly, much of the album follows. I will say that I don't like Lady Midnight all that much though, and A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes comes together a little awkwardly, although I like it more than a lot of people. Also, after seeing another review mention it, I noticed that there are a *couple* moments here where Cohen's lyrical meter slots pretty awkwardly into the songs here. While not quite on the level of Songs Of Leonard Cohen, or Songs of Love and Hate, Songs From A Room is a great album in it's own right, and a worthwhile badge on a fantastic discography.

Most songs are probably from a room, if you think about it.

'Bird on the Wire' is the only song from this one I knew, although apparently I had one of the lyrics wrong: "Like a baby, stillborn" does make more sense than "like a baby, still born", but I stand by my incorrect parse.

Unfortunately, a little too sparse for my preference.

My dad used to play this album in the car a lot when my brother and I were kids, despite us asking him not to. Maybe he did it so we'd grow up knowing life wasn't all sunshine and lollipops - as a child, I didn't fully understand what The Partisan was about, but I knew it sounded bleak. Or maybe he just knew that eventually we would come to appreciate it, because now I really do enjoy Songs from a Room. And while I do think eight-year-old me had a point about Cohen sounding like Elmer Fudd when he goes for the higher notes on Bird on the Wire, I now find that charming.

You don't know what you've got until it's gone.

Sometimes my view of an album is influenced by what I've listend to before. Yesterday it was SZA: an album of pasteurised vocals. smoothed and sanitised by pitch correction and autotune.

Although I'm not a great fan of this collection of 'music to slit your wrists by' songs, I respect Leonard Cohen's voice, the imperfections in pitch, the way notes trail away at the end of a phrase — these are the very things that make it human. And they are something that would be scrubbed away by modern producer's compulsion to polish every vocal until all character and emotion have been battered to death.

That said, this isn't an album I'll be returning to often.

But fuck-you auto-tune - this is the way music should be recorded.

2. + 1 for being real.

Love his voice and storytelling but the music feels repetitive sometimes. Favorite is “You know who I am.”

Noooo not another mopey cohen album. This one even includes shitty flute playing.
I really really don't like his music, and hearing the 20th album of his on this list will not change my opinion. 1*