DIVINE COMEDY - Victory For The Comic Muse

This first decade of the 2000s, besides being an excellent period for pop music in general, is certainly to be counted as the age d'or of a Northern Irishman named Neil Hannon.

That lanky, restless guy who turned up in a suit and tie on Fin De Siècle has transformed, after the necessary Regeneration, into this mature, romantic, faintly sarcastic and thoroughly irresistible modern dandy.

A kind of shift from the Dorian Gray model to the Lord Henry model: after all, following the splendid “Absent Friends”, there had been no more news from the one-man band Divine Comedy, but Hannon, looking closer, has actually been extremely prolific of late.

Both the lesser-known collaborations with Yann Tiersen, Ute Lemper and his friend Joby Talbot, and the high-calibre new productions for names like Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg, show that it's no longer only critics who consider him a true “golden hand” of Western pop (a somewhat old-fashioned-sounding label, one that should bring to mind names such as Burt Bacharach, Scott Walker, Phil Spector, but also Joe Jackson and Paddy McAloon).

A pop of the most classic kind, in short, made of full, harmonic, resolutely timeless melodies and exquisite arrangements, which Hannon shapes both at the piano and with orchestral backing.

This ninth Divine Comedy album is no exception.

But there's more: if “Regeneration” suffered from overproduction (not surprising, given Goldrich's involvement...) and “Absent Friends” might not have appealed to everyone due to its heavy symphonic-operatic-brit-Broadway approach, “Victory For The Comic Muse” is the embodiment of “in media stat virtus”.

Songs built on piano and acoustic guitar and arranged with an orchestra of "only" 15 players, and Hannon still manages his trick of sublimating the verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus formula. Not to mention the lyrics, which for Hannon have never been a minor detail.

This man's imagination is as wonderfully bourgeois as it is sharp and original, and his sense of beauty, like any good dandy's, has few equals. And so here's the myth of the "first time" told and set to music with genuine, impatient adolescent sensitivity in "To Die A Virgin"; or the bitter story of an English aristocrat ("A Lady Of A Certain Age"), at once banal and poignant; or again the original, melodically retro declaration of love that is "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World"; and don't miss the closing "Snowball In Negative", a Leopardi-esque nocturnal monologue with a chilling soundtrack.

To do justice to the music I should also mention the orchestral sweep of "The Plough" (which sounds like an outtake from "Absent Friends"!), the ramshackle country of "Mother Dear", and also the gorgeous cover of "Party Fears Two", a well-deserved tribute to fellow travelers Associates.

The conclusion of this paean is that it will be hard not to fall in love with this album: a record that's spontaneous yet precise down to every detail; elegant and refined, certainly, but nonetheless accessible, suited to an audience aged 7 to 70.

The conclusion is that "Victory For The Comic Muse" definitively cements Hannon's place among the world's finest songwriters, leaving us poor, incurably romantic pop lovers waiting with bated breath for a landmark masterpiece album that seems very close at hand.

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14/10/2006