Songs of Love and Hate (1971) is probably my second favorite Leonard Cohen album after his debut The Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967); although to be honest, they’re nearly tied.
Track 1 from Songs of Love And Hate, ‘Avalanche’, is incredible.. perfect, creepy, and notoriously hard to play (which seems, er- sounds true enough).
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds did a cover of ‘Avalanche’ on their 1984 debut album From Her to Eternity.
An interesting record is Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, which Phil Spector produced using mainly his Wall of Sound* technique (very different than previous Leonard Cohen recordings).
Which brings me to the:
*Wall of Sound: music production technique for pop and rock music recordings developed by record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios during the 1960s (a dense, layered, and reverberant sound that reproduced well on AM radio and jukeboxes popular in the era).
He created this sound by having a number of electric and acoustic guitarists perform the same parts in unison, adding musical arrangements for large groups of musicians up to the size of orchestras, and then recording the sound using an echo chamber. [1]
Ex: From Leonard’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man:
Pretty easy to hear it, right?
Some more notable examples: Spector produced The Beatles’ Let it Be. (You can hear the difference in the the later, remastered Let it Be… Naked produced by McCartney, and therefore without Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’). Brian Wilson used a similar technique on Smile & Pet Sounds, etc.
The obvious usage is found in many of Spector’s girl group songs..
And Then He Kissed Me [The Crystals]
Also:
Currently, the wall of sound pretty heavily influences shoegaze and the like (a good example is My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 album Loveless).
I should point out – this ‘wall of sound’ is completely separate from the Greatful Dead’s version of the term.
Well, goodnight- and speaking of Phil Spector, is this not the greatest picture ever?
