Pair of threes

That a new album by Leonard Cohen, a new Leonard Cohen tribute album, and a new album by Leonard Cohen’s son Adam are coming out simultaneously might be news if a nearly identical trilogy hadn’t materialized just 2½ years ago.

In early 2012, Cohen, then 77, released Old Ideas, which struck many as the Jewish-Buddhist singer-songwriter’s way of girding his loins to meet his Maker. Appearing concurrently were The Songs of Leonard Cohen Covered, in which various indie artists recorded 15 songs from Cohen’s first half-decade, and Adam Cohen’s Like a Man, in which, at 39, Leonard’s son finally quit trying to sound like somebody else’s.

Now the elder Cohen is marking his 80th birthday with more songs built on old ideas (Popular Problems [Columbia]), the cream of Germany’s musical crop is celebrating his first 3½ decades (Poem: Leonard Cohen in Deutscher Sprache [Columbia]), and Adam is embracing his birthright even more explicitly than before (We Go Home [Cooking Vinyl]).

Popular Problems is getting most of the attention. And, given its creator’s stature and the album’s stark exhumation of perennial themes of which dying is only one, it deserves to. Like Old Ideas, it benefits from Patrick Leonard’s subtle production and sensitivity to Judeo-Christian concerns. Even more so than on Old Ideas, the production highlights the light at the end of the tunnel that Cohen is seeing the closer he gets to shuffling off his mortal coil.

The details this time include Cohen’s referring in distant-past tenses to his infamous obsession with carnality (“Did I Ever Love You,” “My Oh My”) and the better-late-than-never ability to sympathize with others’ suffering attendant upon being liberated from sensuality (“Samson in New Orleans,” “Almost like the Blues”).

In “Born in Chains,” Cohen takes that freedom to biblical dimensions. “I was bound to a burden,” he huskily whispers, “but the burden it was raised. / Lord, I can no longer keep this secret. / Blessed is the name, the name be praised.” Later in the song, he identifies with Doubting Thomas.

As for “Hallelujah,” the earliest version of which Cohen recorded 30 years ago, he reclaims it from both his own inferior revisions and its too-many cover versions in “You Got Me Singing.” “You got me singing,” he concludes, “even though it all went wrong. You got me singing the Hallelujah song.” Should he live to record, as he has joked, another album called Unpopular Solutions, there’s little doubt as to Whom those solutions will point.

In We Go Home, Adam Cohen unveils his own “Hallelujah” reclamation project. It’s called “Love Is” and goes, “Love is the most beautiful word that you ever heard. / Love is a line from ‘Hallelujah.’ … ” On the whole, Adam makes too explicit what his father leaves implied and tosses more crumbs to Freudian analysts when he’s not tossing them whole loaves (“Fall Apart”) than is aesthetically seemly. But at his least guarded, he honors his father with touchingly obvious sincerity.

Poem: Leonard Cohen in Deutscher Sprache, meanwhile, proves the durability of Cohen’s melancholy melodies. One need not, in other words, speak German to appreciate the pathos with which the album’s many mellow contributors or its hardest rocker (Peter Maffay doing “Zuerst Also Manhattan” [“First We Take Manhattan”]) clearly identify.

And there’s irony too. When Cohen was born, Adolf Hitler had just assumed full powers. That in 80 years Germany has gone from wanting to exterminate the Cohens of the world to paying the world’s most famous Cohen homage is surely a reason to keep hope alive.