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In recent years The Divine Comedy have become somewhat irrelevant, they were never a particularly 'Cool' band but their descent from popularity was as fast as it was unremarkable. It’s a sad reflection on Neil Hannon et al that their most important contribution to popular culture is providing the theme tune to Father Ted. Since 2004’s underwhelming ‘Absent Friends’ Hannon has been far from lazy, having worked on Charlotte Gainsbourgs album with French maestro’s Air, writing film scores, working with Guy Chambers and providing the theme tune to the underwhelming Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd. Phew, take note Axl Rose - he did that in 2 years and wrote 30 songs for The Divine Comedy’s new record ‘Victory For The Comedy Muse’. So what is the album like?
You will be glad to know that the album is a lovely mixture of great musicality and witty insightful lyrics. The first single to be released from the album, ‘Diva Lady’, is an intelligent lament on the celebrity obsessed ‘Heat’ generation, sample line - “She needs extra make up, for her extra face”. This is Hannon at his most caustic, sighing at the vanity of an unnamed but symbolic modern celebrity. It’s more of a dirty look of an insult than a screaming tirade of abuse but it’s affective nonetheless.
The album has a sense of the third person about it coming from the fact that some of the songs were originally written for other people or from a characters perspective. For example ‘A Lady Of A Certain Age’ depicts an idle widow contemplating a gilded youth through a nostalgic cocktail haze. However for such an impersonal record ‘Mother Dear’ may be one of the most honest songs Hannon has ever written. Elsewhere on the album Hannon inhabits the character of a nervous teenage Don Juan on the album highlight ‘Don’t Want To Die A Virgin’ that has a Smiths esque quality to it.
The album is however, far from perfect. Too often it meanders into a MOR snooze fest with tracks like ‘Snowball In Negative’ and the pretentious ‘Arthur C. Clarkes Mysterious World’ show the kind of sound that has seen the band fall out of favour with the record buying public.
The Divine Comedy may be too much like Radio 2 fodder for some people but in a parallel universe it could easily be conceived that it would not be Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker that we worship but Neil Hannon and his Divine Comedy. Lovely Stuff.
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