Famous Blue Raincoat — The Songs of Leonard Cohen: 20th Anniversary Edition Shout! Factory Music   ••• Sound   ••••

I spent my first years in publishing dwelling in the most rarefied heights of the high end — a region I now realize could have used considerably more oxygen — and all the rage at that time was audiophile-quality recordings of clear-voiced chanteuses covering gravel-voiced singer/songwriters. I was largely taken in by this phenomenon, closing my eyes contemplatively as the music quietly (always quietly) began, nodding appreciatively to every tasteful nuance of the discrete and lithesome arrangements, and appearing, to any neutral observer, completely enthralled by what was transpiring.

A decade later, I feel distinctly snookered. It's not that those qualities weren't there, in both the recordings and the performances. It's just that, while I appreciated them, they never really moved me — a problem I now frequently encounter whenever I go back through the "cream" of my collection of audiophile discs. Most of these albums were created for people who like to keep their music at arm's length — who want to be brushed lightly by the experience, not dragged in, body and soul.

So I had mixed feelings about reviewing the 20th Anniversary Edition of the ne plus ultra of the angel-sings-devil movement, Jennifer Warnes's Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen. I know I was bewitched by it at the time; I also know that at least 6 years have passed since I've felt any urge to slip it into my drive or onto my platter.

Aesthetically, it's an interesting relic of a far more affected age. At this distance, I'd rather dive back into any of Tom Waits's midperiod masterpieces than delve into the Cohen catalog. And as for the various attempts to "redeem" these wayward writer/performers through sheer technique, I'd rather sample Holly Cole's occasionally sublime Waits traversal Temptation.

That said, Bernie Grundman has now remastered Raincoat from the original tapes, and the decision to tinker with an album that some see as an ultimate reference disc presented me with an interesting challenge. So I rounded up all my various copies of Raincoat, including the original Private Music CD and the later Classic Records CD under its Rock the House label, and did the most careful comparison I could.

I ultimately ended up pitting the new Shout! Factory CD against Classic's 180-gram vinyl pressing from 1996 — not out of some snobbish love of analog, but because, after listening repeatedly to the different earlier versions, this was the one that seemed to most accurately capture the recording. (How can I know that if I wasn't in the studio, and if I didn't hear the original mix? I can't. All I know is that it seems to faithfully reproduce the natural sounds of the instruments better than any of the earlier releases.)

While a comparison here of any track from the album would be revealing, I'll settle on "Bird on a Wire," because it has a dense yet clean mix featuring an open-sounding drum kit, lots of miscellaneous percussion, strongly contrasting musical settings, and some challenging choral harmonies near the end.

The Classic LP has the advantage in the midrange and bass, with a livelier, fuller sound to the drum kit in general and the tom-toms in particular, and it pulls Lenny Castro's bongo hits farther out of the mix. It also lets each voice in the choral section be clearly heard, whereas on the Shout! Factory version, the lower-range voices are obscured by the electric bass. But the new CD does better with the higher frequencies. For instance, the triangle, which is all but buried on the Classic LP, clearly rings out now. (Could this be attributed to subtle sonic differences between my CD player and turntable setups? Maybe, but I did enough comparisons between the two sources using other, long-familiar material to pretty much rule out the gear as a factor.)

Overall, can you somehow go wrong buying this new CD? Not really. I find it a little thicker-sounding than Classic's vinyl and CD versions, but the latter two are no longer readily available (and Warnes says they're illegal, to boot). If you want to check out this album for the first time or have lost your old copy — and if you're into recordings as recordings (but aren't that big on goosebumps) — then by all means get the new edition. As for the four bonus tracks, the only one that does much for me is the 1992 live performance of "Joan of Arc," mainly because it has an immediacy that's lacking from all the other tracks, including the original ones.

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