After Bob's fire and brimstone, Len's fin de siècle. For my money, this could be Cohen's best album. And that's on the strength of three high-concept songs: The Future, Anthem and Democracy. These songs both informed and then described the way I felt about the world in the final decade of the Twentieth Century: the expectation of dramatic change, and the cool-headed counter-intuitive assessment of where the real change was coming.
I remember David Byrne talking about the impact of millenarian folk mythology (I think it might have been on the programme that Leanne co-directed). He said that the millennium led people to pack their mental bags, to be ready for change if it came. And the very fact that lots of people had their bags packed made change more likely — because there's less inertia in the system. The Future has the mythology:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said "Repent, Repent"
I wonder what they meant
And then, with everyone still chattering about the fall of the Berlin Wall and old-school communism, Cohen has the wit to turn his gaze on America, at the time of the LA riots, and in the face of the end of history. In Democracy he comes out with:
It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Along with the postmodern Old Testament of The Future and the sociologically-savvy contemporary history of Democracy, Cohen delivers his Zen-informed spiritual stoicism of Anthem:
You can add up the parts
but you wont have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
Thats how the light gets in.
In almost anyone else's hands, these themes would sound like portentous twaddle. Scoff if you like, but I think this is profound.
Aside from these songs, The Future is no concept album. Unusually for Cohen, there are two cover versions of love songs, including an eight-minute version of Irving Berlin's Always, plus an instrumental.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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