The Album
New Skin for the Old Ceremony was Leonard Cohen's fourth studio album, arriving after a period of personal turmoil and a growing reputation as a brooding, literary songwriter whose first three records had built a devoted but niche following. For this one he turned to young arranger John Lissauer, trading the spare folk settings of his earlier work for chamber-pop arrangements built around viola, horns, woodwinds and a female vocal chorus, giving the songs a theatrical, almost cabaret-like richness. “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” became one of Cohen's most famous compositions, a frank and tender recollection of an encounter widely understood to involve Janis Joplin. “Who by Fire” reworked the Unetanneh Tokef prayer from the Jewish High Holy Days liturgy into a meditation on mortality, while songs like “A Singer Must Die” and “Field Commander Cohen” carried the wry, self-mocking irony that would become a signature of his later writing. The record sold modestly and received mixed reviews on release, often overshadowed by the more austere image of his debut, but it has since been reassessed by critics and fellow songwriters as one of the most fully realized and emotionally direct albums of Cohen's career, prized for the way its lush arrangements never bury the bluntness of the lyrics. It remains a pivotal bridge between the stark folk of his 1960s work and the more produced, genre-roaming albums that followed later in the decade.
The Label
Both sides carry the orange CBS box/eye design in black print, with the concentric-ring CBS square logo, the standard rights-reserved rim text, and “MADE IN ENGLAND” at the foot; the label is flat, with no deep-groove ring. The ℗ 1974 CBS Inc. copyright line fixes the record to 1974 or later and this English manufacturing text places it with the UK/European pressing run of this catalogue number rather than the Dutch-pressed “Made in Holland” variant that shares the same number and year. The label carries no further printed sub-variant markers, so finer placement within this catalogue number's pressing runs rests on the matrix cut rather than on the label art.
Fidelity
The album was tracked and mixed at Sound Ideas Studios in New York under engineers Rick Rowe and Frank Laico, with Leanne Ungar assisting; the arrangements' close chamber scoring rewards a clean early cut more than a heavily compressed later one. Collectors generally regard the original-era CBS pressings, in either their US Columbia or UK/European CBS form, as the most natural-sounding versions of this record, with later reissues (including the Sundazed and current Columbia import LPs) viewed as solid but not clearly superior alternatives. This A2/B1-cut copy sits among the earlier runout configurations documented for the pressing, ahead of copies carrying the later re-etched stampers.
Notes
This is a 1974 CBS stereo pressing of New Skin for the Old Ceremony, catalogue S 69087/CBS 69087, manufactured for the UK/European market. The orange CBS square-eye flat label and “Made in England” rim text date it to the 1974 release window, since the ℗ 1974 line is itself the earliest the label can be. The matrix carries an A2/B1 cut, the same cut identifier used across the title's early CBS pressings; the label shows no deep groove and no further printed sub-variant markers, so the pressing's exact place among copies of this catalogue number rests on the matrix cut rather than on the label art.
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