DIVINE COMEDY - Rainy Sunday Afternoon

A typical rainy Sunday, a day set aside for memories, with music as the place to gather emotions and reflections. "Rainy Sunday Afternoon" is the most intimate and personal diary of Neil Hannon, a cultured and well-balanced account from one of the most lucid and consistent songwriters of our time.

The new Divine Comedy record isn't necessarily yet another masterpiece - though many will be ready to call it one, albeit with a touch of thinly veiled nostalgia - but it is the closest thing to a literary and cinematic transposition of the Northern Irish musician's many metamorphoses: the most elegiac, but also the darkest, a Hollywood-style version of Hannon's most secret and romantic world.

It's no secret that most of the songs are leftovers or offcuts from the soundtrack to "Wonka" (the 2023 film starring Timothée Chalamet), while the lyrics span a much longer timeframe, stories carefully kept in a drawer waiting for a slightly autobiographical project. Thanks to the film's success and greater financial means, Neil was this time able to afford recording the album at the famous Abbey Road Studios: ten days of rehearsals and another ten of recording for an album that marks a new stage in Divine Comedy's creative journey. It's a fulfilling experience that returns the musician to the role of crooner in the style of early Scott Walker, an admirer of Burt Bacharach but also of John Barry, while also drawn to Electric Light Orchestra-style symphonic-pop arrangements: that is, how to achieve a grand orchestral effect in small spaces and with few instrumental elements.

With a rich array of ideas and arrangement solutions, "Rainy Sunday Afternoon" is a record that sweeps away the excessive cheerfulness and eclecticism of "Office Politics", in favour of a more coherent narrative. Only the easy-pop-jazz zest of the title track, in a Randy Newman vein, craves a more radio-friendly lightness, while the frivolity of "All The Pretty Lights" still pays tribute to Hannon's recent experience as a film composer. What remains intact is the usual degree of romanticism, even if shadows and unease often take over, amid forays into the most theatrical and eccentric glam rock ("Down The Rabbit Hole") and an atypical drum-machine-driven tango that turns the clock back even further, to the Fifties and Sixties ("Mar-a-Lago By The Sea").

The album sits ideally somewhere between the orchestral grandeur of "A Short Album About Love" and the organic cohesion of "Regeneration", further reinforcing the influence of the sixth man, Nigel Godrich. And it is precisely in the footsteps of that same "Regeneration" that one of the album's most heartfelt reflections unfolds, "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", where Neil lays bare the joys and sorrows of the endless pursuit of happiness.

Hannon entrusts the opening triptych with the album's most refined and intimate lyrics, starting with the single "Achilles", a song inspired by the tragic fate of the poet Patrick Shaw-Stewart and the horrors of the First World War; death is also the narrative thread of "The Last Time I Saw The Old Man" (picture early Scott Walker backed by John Barry's orchestra). This time the subject of the story is his father, who died after suffering from Alzheimer's; the melody is gorgeous, deeply moving.

It then falls to "The Man Who Turned Into A Chair" to sweep away the melancholy with a bohemian atmosphere, a touch of irony and a slice of familiar everyday life (an argument with his wife). But it only takes a few notes of "I Want You" to realise that this time Neil Hannon isn't afraid to lay his emotions bare, even at the risk of sounding saccharine - a trap he carefully avoids thanks to musically erudite songwriting and a constant attention to detail ("Can't Let Go").

The family album (father, wife and friends) closes with the presence of Neil's daughter on the record's final track, "Invisible Thread", another elegant page in an album that shows Divine Comedy in fine form, while well aware that it's time to look toward new horizons. "Rainy Sunday Afternoon" is just the first step.

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21/09/2025