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From The Desk Of Alasdair Roberts: Leonard Cohen’s “Songs Of Love And Hate”

Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.

LeonardCohen

Roberts: I felt it would be appropriate to include something Canadian for MAGNET, so I’m going for the Canadian musical artist whose work has undoubtedly meant the most to me over the years. Leonard Cohen‘s album Songs Of Love And Hate has been a favourite LP of mine since I first encountered it in my late teens. It is etched on my consciousness to the extent that I don’t actually need to put the record on in order to hear it. To me, it seems like Cohen’s gesamtkunstwerk, although I don’t know whether he’d be happy to hear it framed in such Germanic terms—there’s a completeness, a wholeness to the work that manifests in each individual track (and I think that every song is a stand-alone triumph) but also within the songs collectively, taken as a complete cycle. It has many of the things I love about art and music in general: darkness, humour, depth, simplicity, humility, passion, restraint … and, of course, love and hate. Hearing Leonard sing about seeing “the serpent eat its tail” lets me know that he’s wrestled with the philosophical notion of eternal recurrence (which has been an artistic preoccupation of mine at certain points too)—and this is music to which I believe that I will eternally return.

Video after the jump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ux0yeo4Y0I