Leonard Cohen: The Future (Columbia records).
IT IS ironic an album depending so much on the past should be entitled The Future.
Leonard Cohen has been described as a poet and Renaissance man but he is, above all, miserable.
This is what Cohen has been doing since his debut album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, back in Christmas 1967.
He follows no melody and simply recites his ''poetry'' using rhythm to help the flow.
The Future is something of an anachronism - the arrangements and moods would be familiar even to those people who stopped listening to him in January 1968.
Cohen does make the odd concession to the 1990s in that synthesisers can be heard throughout, but he has such a distinctive and monotonous vocal style it is hard to detect any development over the past decades.