”I guess they won’t exchange the gifts…”

”…that you were meant to keep.” Thus wrote Leonard Cohen, and there is no need to tell what were the consequences. Ten New Songs was released in October 2001. I should forgive and forget the whining of those Cohen fan(atic)s who sang in their midnight choirs how the new album is nothing, the old ones are everything. We don’t hear that kind of tune anymore, anywhere. And it is one of Cohen’s best albums, the lyrics are all masterpieces. They really show you where we are going and what’s coming to us. Not altogether without hope, as The Future had been, well, more or less?

Even though I was pretty much the only one listening to the album then, me and the middle-aged ladies, of course. Buddhist themes meet the Jewish heritage, measuring each other in a unique way. A few years later I wrote a review of the next album (Dear Heather) for the Finnish metal magazine Inferno, in which I also returned to this one. It was never published, and I lost the text somehow. But the main point was that you may need to go to a monastery and spend almost a decade there, before you can come back and tell the world of popular cult what was going on below. The amount of hate is everywhere so vast, and was already in the nineties, that without a hermitage one could not see through all the excrement anymore. For me this thought was enlightening.