Leonard Cohen’s 14th studio album, “You Want It Darker,” seems like another way to say goodbye.The old stager, now 82, has been bidding us adieu for some time. On “Popular Problems” in 2014 for example, there are references to slowing down, frozen hearts, withering trees, and winter lasting forever.This time, the title track is especially magnificent, with the éminence-grise star muttering: “If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame/ You want it darker/ We kill the flame.” He finally declares, in a deep voice of pure doom: “I’m ready, my lord.” The album was followed by Cohen making comments saying that he is indeed “ready to die” – and then, later, a defiant contradiction, saying he’s not about to sign off just yet and indeed wants to live forever. Well, his music will, or at least some of it.The new record hardly ever moves out of first gear. The voice rarely rises above a gravelly whisper, just occasionally moving into song from speech. The backing is minimalistic, tastefully produced in Rick Rubin style by Cohen’s son Adam.Many figures in rock make their finest albums near the start of their career – the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and so on. Cohen is unusual in kicking in with a late Indian summer. This is even when his earlier work is also impressive, if not with the dazzling wordplay of Bob Dylan. He has always been economical with lyrics in a way that outshines Randy Newman or Tom Waits.Some Cohen fans have been publicly suggesting that their man would be a more worthy Nobel Laureate than Dylan. If Cohen’s downbeat album is one of the best of the year, Nick Cave’s restrained “Skeleton Tree” is up there with it and also comes pre-loaded with a mortal theme.Cave was rehearsing it with the Bad Seeds when his 15-year-old son Arthur died in an accident on a Brighton cliff. A few commentators have compared it with “Tears in Heaven,” about Eric Clapton’s four-year-old son Conor, who fell from a 53rd-floor window. Apart from its pained creation, the music is hardly similar, and in fact a lot of the Cave album was already shaping up before his own tragedy. Typical though is the glacial song “Jesus Alone” with its biographical opening “You fell from the sky, crash landed in a field near the River Adur” and its repeated final chorus “With my voice I am calling you.” There is life after death, it seems. Minimalism and mortality are clearly the new black. Just like the gothic black of these two album covers.
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