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List Price: $7.98 | | Label: Sbme Special Mkts.
Salesrank: 1408
Released: March 1, 2008 |
| Our Price: $3.58 |
| Used Price: $4.89 |
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| Media: Audio CD |
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New Skin for the Old Ceremony Track Listing:
1. Is This What You Wanted
2. Chelsea Hotel No. 2
3. Lover, Lover, Lover
4. Field Commander Cohen
5. Why Don't You Try
6. There Is a War
7. Singer Must Die
8. I Tried to Leave You
9. Who by Fire
10. Take This Longing
11. Leaving Greensleeves
New Skin for the Old Ceremony Reviews:
New Skin for the Old Ceremony 
2008-09-26 - New Skin for the Old Ceremony is grand record from Cohen. Once more Cohen showcases his immense talent with tracks such as Chelsea Hotel and Who By Fire. Cohen's lyrics are filled with immense intelligence, wit and sometimes a quirky sense of humour. The cover is very beautifull and depicts the spiritual union of the male and female principle. For some reason they made a cheap book-let and that is such a shame for such a wonderful recording.
Not my favorite 
2007-03-25 - I have grown into quite the Leonard Cohen fan, but this particular CD goes to the bottom of the growing pile of my Cohen collection. I can't even remember why, just that I wasn't interested in listening to it again, unlike all of his others, which I play over and over, seemingly never tiring of them.
I locked you in this body, I meant it as a kind of trial; you can use it as a weapon, or to make some woman smile.
2005-12-09 - In terms of the individual songs on this album, they are varied but all strong and coherent. This album really breaks away from Cohen's other early works in terms of production values. It has a bright sound, and slightly fuller instrumentation on some tracks. I would also say that with this album, Cohen ends his classic early period epitomized by his first four or five albums. As an explanation to some confused reviewers, the song "Who by Fire" is derived from a Jewish prayer recited on Yom Kippur, with Cohen's english translation not mirroring the original, but capturing its' prescience.
Marred by a few lackluster songs 
2002-11-05 - I must admit, Leonard Cohen bounces back and forth between my #1 and #2 spots on my "best musicians of all time" list (he and Tom Waits switch places depending on my mood). Yet with the exception of his first album I find it hard to give any of his albums five stars. Typically Cohen includes a few songs that simply aren't as evocative or haunting as the masterpieces that peek out between them. On this disk that slot is taken by the songs "Why Don't You Try" and "Is This What You Wanted?". Both songs limp along ably enough to their finishes; it is just that in contrast to the genius displayed elsewhere by Cohen, they come off as filler songs that push the total track number up high enough to call this an album. These are songs that lesser lyricists would be happy to call their best, but with my higher standards for Cohen I am still holding out for an album as consistent as his first.
You may be wondering now why I count Cohen as my first-or-second favorite artist after I have expressed such opinions about his music, and the reason is simply this: that when he's good, he's so good that he blows everyone else away. One of his greatest songs is on this album: "Chelsea Hotel #2". This song at first drove me, like Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35", to wonder where the first version of "Chelsea Hotel" had gone. but after one listen to the song, I decided it was irrelevant. The version Cohen has here is flawless. I have heard that this song was written for Janis Joplin, but personal details become unnecessary in the face of such a heartfelt and powerful song. One does not need to have had the exact experience Cohen describes to understand the feelings he is converying; you only need to have one "fallen robin" in your past and his song can mutate into your story, told better than you ever could tell it. The song also contains a bitter and ironic last verse that rivals "Dress Rehearsal Rag" on "Songs of Love and Hate" for reversal of audience expectations.
But don't think that's the only good song here. "A Singer Must Die" is a poignant allegory, one even more relevant as we witness loss of traditional civil liberties in the US and in other parts of the world. "Who By Fire" is justly ranked among Cohen's best also, detailing what I hear as a list of different ways to die, though I would welcome remarks from anyone with a different interpretation of the meaning of this song. "Who by Fire" also demonstrates the proper way for Cohen to integrate the choir of females he employs as back-up singers into his songs in a tasteful manner. In later albums he seems to abuse their existence, allowing them to upstage his mellow, despairing voice. But here they blend perfectly. Finally, "There is a War" foreshadows Cohen's explicitly political turn in his later album "The Future". All in all, this ranks among Cohen's better recordings, and it is worth wading through the mediocre tunes to get to his true gems.
Poetry in motion
2002-07-12 - New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a masterpiece, and one of Leonard Cohen's best albums. It's a truly great effort, and too often overlooked. Although his first three albums - particularly the first and third - are all certified masterpieces, this one, his fourth, was his first attempt to move beyond them in scope. Incorporating background vocalists and a wider array of instrumentation than he employed on those sparse first three efforts, Cohen creates here an album broader, more epic in scope than its predecessors. He also began, for the first time, to lighten up on the subject matter of his lyrics: incorporating some - albeit rather dark - humor into several of the songs here, Cohen creates an album - which, along with its broader musical pallette - that is a much easier listen this his first three, which were at times so depressing as to lend themselves to the status of "mood" albums. That said, Cohen is Cohen, and his themes remain the same; he has a lighter touch here at times, is all. Although the opening track, Is This What You Wanted?, features lyrics like "You were K.Y. Jelly/I was Vaseline" much of the rest of the album is pervaded with a deep and dark sense of self-loathing: Cohen places himself on a pedastal and de-construcs his persona as he did on "Avalanche", but in a much less abstract, far more direct and disturbing way. Cohen at this time was going through a period of extreme personal depression and writer's block (which would culminate in the Phil Spector collaboration on Death of A Ladies' Man), and songs such as Field Commander Cohen and A Singer Must Die attest to his state of mind at the time. A deep, dark, driving masterpiece with just the right amount of light touch, New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a great album, and an essential purchase for any admirer of Leonard Cohen.
