Getting On A New Train

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: LEONARD COHEN

ALBUM: THE FUTURE

LABEL: COLUMBIA

THE BOTTOM LINE: One of contemporary songwriting's most vital resources at the top of his high-altitude form.

First reactions are especially valuable in cases like this. Forget the furrowed brow and the repeated candlelight reading of the lyric sheet with a glass of cheap red beside the CD jewel box. Whenever a performer of Leonard Cohen's high caliber and even higher seriousness comes out with a new album, the instinct is to treat it as if it were an invitation to a semiotics seminar or a cryptogram from a reclusive shaman poet. But just this once, never mind all that. The Future is a record to get onto, like an express from the far side of paradise, even before you get into it.

It's a typically eccentric mixture of Cohen tunes and moods -- sensual, alarming, cautionary, caustic, devastating -- that gives the music the eerie persistence of a half-heard spell. But even his eccentricity is so wide- ranging, so continually renewing and surprising, that it probably isn't fair to call it typical. Anyone who expects the morose, slightly spacy voluptuary who sang, most famously, on the sound track of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller -- the Cohen who sounded like Villon with frostbite -- is in for a mighty shock encountering The Future.

Cohen practically purrs here. He sings smoothly, if not prettily, and his writing has a measure of spareness that is new to it. The sound may be odd, as suprising as his outing with the amok Phil Spector on 1977's perplexing Death of a Ladies' Man. But it suits and insinuates. And the writing still has the same carbolic kick.

Cohen is not one of those artists he characterizes in the title track as "lousy little poets/ Coming round/ Trying to sound like Charlie Manson." He knows how to be vulnerable as well as play at it. His love songs twist the heart around like fingers knotting a string. The gloomy ironies of political caution, like Democracy, are applied with a sense of urgency but salved by some surefooted wit ("I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean:/ I love the country but I can't stand the scene") that neatly sidesteps sermonizing.

Fans will surely recognize the territory he describes in Closing Time ("Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It's something in between, I guess") as prime Cohen real estate in which they have already put down stakes. But even they may be puzzled by a reasonably straightforward if not entirely adept version of the Irving Berlin chestnut Always. No fear, however. Even if Cohen tried to go Vegas, Caesars Palace would sound like the City Lights bookstore.