Cohen: Fun, Finality : CHECK LIST: ****Great Balls of Fire***Good Vibrations**Maybe Baby*Running on Empty

***LEONARD COHEN. “I’m Your Man.” Columbia. When Cohen sings, “I was born like this. I had no choice. I was born with the gift of a golden voice,” the joke is built-in, because in fact his voice moves tortoise-like through this album, without a trace of agility or resonance.

What’s more, it’s become even deeper since his last album in 1984, like a piece of debris drifting toward the ocean floor. Cohen’s basso depresso exhales an air of resignation and finality, while its deadpan insistence makes it funny at the same time.

And the resilient, 53-year-old Zen master of singer-songwriters seems determined to have fun this time out. He is still logging the treacheries and obsessions of the human heart with his unbeatable religious/political/mystical/erotic imagery, but a wink lightens the solemn visage, and Cohen allows more eccentricity to emerge than he has since he conked skulls with Phil Spector in ’77.

The stuttering synthesizer pulse of “First We Take Manhattan” probably won’t put Cohen up there with Depeche Mode and Samantha Fox on the dance charts, but its urgent tension suits the scenario of a long-simmering revenge fantasy coming to a boil. This same fevered sound recurs in “Jazz Police” with even more dissonance, imparting appropriate agitation to the singer’s apocalyptic paranoia.

Cohen also applies some Gypsy flavors (in “Everybody Knows,” a requiem for the sexual revolution) and Euro-cabaret touches (“Take This Waltz”) to his folk-pop palette, but the LP’s dominant musical strain is a sort of art-country, a simple, amiable setting in which Cohen seems comfortable to the point of looseness.

He intones the title truth of “Ain’t No Cure for Love” with restrained authority, knowing there’s no need to push it. In “I’m Your Man” he dips into his subsonic range to underscore the lyric’s pledges of ridiculously total submission, letting the clip-clop arrangement carry the humor.

Cohen says so long from a window of “The Tower of Song.” He signs off as a worn, forlorn but feisty old character whose place of refuge is gradually revealed to be not a temple, not a rest home, but an asylum--throwing a slightly different light on his religious visions. It’s a wicked final twist from an artist still clearly on top of his game.