Leonard Cohen - Live In Dublin

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine live album

This is a fine live album. There's a really good selection of Cohen's works, a terrific band and the Old Tom Cat himself is on great form.

This is a recording over 3 CDs of a concert in Dublin from the Old Ideas tour in 2013 - the two "halves" either side of the interval and the 8-song encore which is effectively a third half itself. A glance at the track list will show you that it's a great programme from throughout Cohen's career (I find it incredibly evocative to hear these arrangements of Suzanne and So Long, Marianne almost 50 years on, by the way) and they almost all sound great. The arrangements are very good indeed and the band is absolutely brilliant; they are musically tight but sound relaxed and easy with the material and each other and the overall sound is superb. The "sublime Webb Sisters" as Cohen himself calls them are indeed sublime and there is real new life in every one of these great songs.

Cohen is brilliant. His voice sounds great - it is deep and rich and he sounds much more like an out-and-out singer than he does on Old Ideas itself. I love his mixture of singing and whispering on the studio album, but I love this too and it's a treat to have both. His relationship with his audience is warm, witty and self-deprecating. There's a lovely bit of banter from him in Tower Of Song, for example, and a genuine, affectionate whoop from the audience at the line "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." It really makes me wish I could have been there.

I don't find every song brilliant - there's something slightly disappointing about Halleluja, for example - but others may well not agree because these things are a matter of personal response. Whether you agree or not, if you're a Cohen fan you certainly won't be disappointed with this album and will probably love it. It's a wonderful record of a genius in fine form and I can recommend it very warmly.