Album Review : Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladies Man (1977)
Listen to Death of a Ladies Man here
Leonard Cohen’s fifth album Death of a Ladies Man is one of these records that is way more often discussed than it is listened to. Mostly because the story of its production is more interesting than the product itself. Recorded at gunpoint by a crazed, boozed up Phil Spector, it is widely regarded to be the weakest album of Cohen’s career. Cohen himself halfheartedly admitted it in interview. Is it that bad? How can a Leonard Cohen record be so bad that it is panned by the man himself. Well, I’ve listened to Death of a Ladies Man for you and… it’s weird. It’s much weirder than it is bad.
Death of a Ladies Man has little to do with the Leonard Cohen you know and love. It is more who Phil Spector thought Leonard Cohen was than anything else. A smart, but smarmy ladykiller who lived in a world where sex consumed everything. It’s not cheap or unmemorable like bad songs usually are, but it is so far out of character that it really fills like Cohen is playing a cartoony version of himself. Phil Spector had a trademark production style he called Wall of Sound, which bombarded the listened with layers of instrumentation and it does not fit Cohen’s style at all.
The aggressive flutes on the opener True Love Leaves No Trace sound like they’re from a lounge scene in a Bond movie. They don’t leave any breathing room for Cohen’s quirky charm. It dictates how he has to perform. It’s not a bad song at all, but it doesn’t have anything that makes Leonard Cohen who he is to it. Couldn’t been song by any talented performer. Same thing for the bombastic Iodine, with its in-your-face brass section and crude metaphor. Once again, it’s not a bad song… but it’s a Tom Jones song from top to bottom. It’s so out of character.
Unlike the previous Leonard Cohen records I’ve reviewed, Death of a Ladies Man doesn’t have a flagship song. It is not remembered for anything. I believe the best song is the lurid, but insanely catchy Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On, which I believe implicitly praises the merits of late night masturbation. The instrumentation goes (again) WAY overboard with porno guitar and saxophones, but it has an infectious singalong quality to it. It’s a great song to sing when you’re blue balled. If it has been sang by anyone but Leonard Cohen, it would’ve been more popular.
So, Death of a Ladies Man is not conventionally bad. It’s just ridiculously overproduced and the bombastic instrumentals seem to funnel Leonard Cohen in directions he would not have chosen otherwise. Whenever he’s given more breathing room, like on the title song and Paper Thin Hotel, the complex and gifted storyteller reemerges. One impression I had about Death of a Ladies Man is that it’s the first Leonard Cohen album where he wrote lyrics to existing arrangements and not the opposite. I might be wrong, but it does mark a turn in his career.
There you have it. I cannot bring myself to say that Death of a Ladies Man is a bad album, because I don’t believe it is. I think it’s barely worse than his previous effort New Skin for the Old Ceremony. I do understand why a Leonard Cohen fan would be angry at it, though. It’s not him. It’s like… the soundtrack of a Leonard Cohen boozy dream? Death of a Ladies Man is not conventionally bad, but it is insane. It does deserve its heavyweight title belt of worst Leonard Cohen album of all-time (at least for now), but only barely. It’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
6.6/10
