Pitchfork

Photos by Kathryn Yu

After leaving a Buddhist monastery, where he spent the better part of five years, Leonard Cohen wasted little time getting back to work. He quickly released two albums of new material, and wrote and produced another for his acolyte Anjani. He published a book of poetry and photography, was feted in the documentary I'm Your Man, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And in true rock'n'roll fashion, he fended off and reciprocated several lawsuits, many cleaning up the mess from a former manager that left him just this side of skint.

Yet last night's appearance at New York's Beacon Theatre marked Leonard Cohen's first U.S. performance in more than 15 years, the inaugural American stop of a comeback tour that will soon bring him across the States, including a show at this spring's Coachella festival (where Cohen shares marquee comeback status with the reunited Throbbing Gristle-- do we smell collaboration?). Resplendent in a suit and hat that hid a full head of silver hair (though virtually the whole band wore hats as well), Cohen looked thin and limber, belying his 74 years (and no doubt the product of all that meditation and, if his jokes were to believed, a bit of medication, too) as he led his band through two and a half hours of music drawn from the intersection of folk, rock, pop, and cabaret.

While the set comprised such classics as "Suzanne", "So Long, Marianne", "Chelsea Hotel #2", "Everybody Knows", "Tower of Song", and other mini-masterpieces, Cohen's show never came across as pat as a greatest hits set. For starters, most of the songs he sang hardly constitute hits, per se. Heck, "Hallelujah" was all but lost amidst Cohen's 1980s output until the likes of John Cale, Rufus Wainwright, and, of course, Jeff Buckley rescued it from obscurity. But more intriguingly, Cohen's songs seem to have transcended the passage of time, with cuts as old as the 1960s and as new as this decade miraculously free from the trappings of nostalgia. And yes, that included the Weimar disco of "First We Take Manhattan" and the somehow not dated "The Future", inspired by the L.A. riots but oddly timeless with its doom-laden prophecy "I've seen the future, brother, it is murder."

Vitally, unlike such erstwhile peers as Bob Dylan, Cohen still respects the power of his words, still tweaking and perfecting his lines to suit his rumbling baritone croak rather than lazily glossing over them. The dude's a poet, after all, and even when his band sacrificed spontaneity if favor of strict professionalism, and especially when the arrangements veered to the smoother side of jazz, Cohen's words and voice remained riveting. As Buddhist monk modest as Cohen may be, he seemed to recognize this as well as he generously invited the crowd back into his inimitable world of sex and spirituality while graciously welcoming himself back in ours.