After falling into the habit of downing three bottles of Chateau Latour on show nights in the early nineties, Leonard Cohen checked himself into the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside of L.A. in 1994 and lived there for five years as a Buddhist monk. When he returned from the mountain, he came with songs like stone tablets: chiseled, authoritative, and mysterious. The lyrics of 2001’s Ten New Songs are disciplined, brief, and contain multitudes; Cohen’s gift for saying everything at once and giving nothing away was never sharper (“In My Secret Life,” “Here It Is”). If it didn’t sound so much like the soundtrack of a late-90s educational computer game, it might be my runaway pick for Cohen’s best album. This isn’t to say that the record it lacks good melody and good singing (we can thank the heavy presence of Cohen collaborator Sharon Robinson for that), they just don’t fully overcome Cohen’s inexplicable desire to record these astonishing songs with the kind of preset groove tracks you find on a kids’ keyboard. Even so, it bears repeat listens like few records of its time; only two of the ten are misses.