Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 5099746064228
Label: Columbia
Manufacturer: Columbia
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Columbia
Release Date: July 02, 1990
Studio: Columbia

---

Disc 1:

1. First We Take Manhattan
2. Ain't No Cure For Love
3. Everybody Knows
4. I'm Your Man
5. Take This Waltz
6. Jazz Police
7. I Can't Forget
8. Tower Of Song

Related Items:

• Various Positions
• The Future
• Ten New Songs
• New Skin for the Old Ceremony
• Songs of Leonard Cohen
• see more

Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display

---

Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humoured evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I was born like this, I had no choice," the gravelly Cohen intimates at disc's end. "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." ---Rickey Wright

Amazon.co.uk Review:
I'm Your Man appeared at a fortuitous moment for Cohen. The previous year, Jennifer Warnes had scored a major hit with Famous Blue Raincoat--an album of Cohen's songs. Possibly enthused by the idea of a large, primed and expectant audience, the 54-year-old Cohen delivered--in I'm Your Man--arguably the finest album of his illustrious career. The music here is never the baleful acoustic strumming Cohen is still popularly associated with: rather, he opted for a peculiarly sparse electronic style that often sounded as if it was being played on a variety of toys. This tack might have been disastrous--and indeed is, on "Jazz Police", the album's only clunker--but is redeemed by Cohen's gloomy, portentous voice, mixed well to the fore, and what might well be the finest collection of lyrics ever bestowed upon a rock & roll album. From the terrific opening line ("They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/For trying to change the system from within", from "First We Take Manhattan") the words on I'm Your Man are relentlessly wise, rueful and hilarious, and capped splendidly by the climactic "Tower Of Song". This track, which has since been covered by James, the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Fatima Mansions and Nick Cave, among others, is the definitive statement of the magnificent absurdity of the rock & roll singer: "I said to Hank Williams... how lonely does it get?". Genius. --Andrew Mueller




Rating: - AN ALBUM YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WITH
but that applies to all of Leonard Cohen's albums. "I'm your Man" features his perhaps most famous - or certainly one of his most famous - tracks of all time, FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN which is my favorite from this album and has been covered many times, but never has been performed as good as here. This certainly marks a change in Leonard Cohen's music, now not as minimalistic as before, but still as great as ever.

---

Rating: - A majestic collection of songs of the highest quality.
As an album that you hear when your parents play it and come back to later to realise it's simply amazing, you can't get much better than this. Leonard Cohen is an amazing man, who has created an amazing number of amazing songs over the year. For me, though, this is his essential album. Partly it's because my parents played it over and over when it first came out, and when I was too young to understand music like this for all its depth. I came back to it about five years ago to find that not only ... Read More

---

Rating: - Cohen: Man For All Seasons
There really are not words enough to describe the sweep and grandeur of Leonard's 1988 masterpiece. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale its infinite variety. There are many common misperceptions of Mr.Cohen, but none more frustrating to a lifelong fan than that of suicidal, morbid folk-singer. My own personal vision is of the ultimate caberet crooner, the last-dance, last-chance, end-of-the-night performer, dispensing gems of wisdom sometimes with an urbane humour, but always with love and a song ... Read More

---

Rating: - Lorca and more
The singalong melodies of Manhattan, Aint No Cure and Everybody Knows contrast well with Cohen's trademark preoccupation with romantic despair and judeo-christian imagery as in: "It's written in the scriptures, it's written there in blood ..." or "everybody's got this broken feeling/Like their father or their dog just died."

John Bilezikjian's oud adds a special dimension to Everybody Knows. The elegant Take This Waltz is a lilting song that brings the Vienna of Federico Garcia Lorca ... Read More

---

Rating: - Be careful
Be careful with this album, played too often and Cohen will steal your soul. And you'll want to be stolen.

---