Product Description

'Victory For The Comic Muse' is the ninth album from Neil Hannon's Divine Comedy. Not to be confused with the band's debut album 'Fanfare For The Comic Muse', this album yet againshowcases Hannon's uncanny knack of being able to marry evocative, character-based lyrics and orchestral flourishes into a winning pop formula. Includes the single 'Diva Lady'.

Track Listing

1. To Die A Virgin
2. Mother Dear
3. Diva Lady
4. Lady Of A Certain Age
5. Light Of Day
6. Threesome
7. Party Fears Two
8. Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World
9. Plough
10. Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont
11. Snowball In Negative

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17887 in Music
• Released on: 2006-06-19
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Nine albums in, and Neil Hannon’s taste for archly literate pop – and, indeed, for the occasional saucy gag, delivered with eyebrow curled – remains. "You don’t know how much I need you," he croons, on schoolboy’s lament ‘To Die A Virgin, "The ‘Handy Andy’s I’ve been through." Seemingly a reference to The Divine Comedy’s long unavailable debut Fanfare For The Comic Muse, Victory… sees Hannon fronting a band that skimps not on the symphonics, including as it does a thirteen-piece string section, harp, French Horn, and oboe – not to mention a certain Dougie Payne of Travis on bass. A certain jauntiness is in evidence on the galloping ‘Party Fears Two’, originally by Scottish pop act The Associates, but far more dominant here is pathos-laden orchestral suites such as ‘Snowball In Negative’ and the touching ‘A Lady Of A Certain Age’, tale of a faded society girl in the midst of her twilight years: "Your husband’s hollow heart gave out one Christmas day/He left the villa to his mistress in Marseilles". Best track here, though, is ‘Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World’, a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus-type number which invokes the memory of the paranormal-obsessed British sci-fi author with comic results. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

Victory for The Divine Comedy... and for Julie McKee?!
This is a great album. We start of with To Die a Virgin, which is humorously described as the worst possible fate. A comical mixture of happy-musical vehicle and morbid theme. Next it's the more accessible, Mother Dear, about first realising that one's mother 'is a person in her own right'. The song moves on to the 'being adopted' theme - deconstructing heavy issues by presenting them with mock seriousness and hill-billy banjo's in the background! Diva Lady opens with a superb rhythm/bass/piano groove - and you just know what the subject matter is going to be like: yes, it's a kind of David Bowie style commentary on a Diva's 'special needs'. Excellent chorus - 'she's got 30 people in her entourage just in case her ego needs a massage'. Superb track! Makes you wonder what we're going to get with A Lady of a Certain Age. This track is about the rich-trappings and imprisonments - and hence melancholy and nostalgias - of being a higher-class lady - 'to keep your sanity a nanny was employed'. 'That's what they they did in those days' suggests some kind of period-piece like Suzan Howatch's Penmaric. The Light of Day is about melancholic reflection upon a past relationship through finding an old photo. This is vaguely reminiscent of The Smiths - except with better musicianship. Threesome is a very short track - the instrumental nature of which both leaves the listener to their imagination and sounds like the music to a silent Charlie Chaplin film. Party Fears Two has an odd military-drum and brass um-pah sound - which forms the backing to what seems to be an absurd description of pre-party fears based on how the booze might trash one's manners and etiquette. Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World draws parallels between the said BBC programme and the narrator's woman friend. Other parallels include the woman in the 80s who was allergic to everything, the Baltic Sea, the expanding universe, uncharted territory, and so on - the point being to liken his woman to all that is completely baffling. Yet, at least she is 'lovely as could be'. Next up it's a Russian-sounding track called The Plough - about a farmer's boy going to the city. He starts as an office-boy, but rises through the firm - only to discover company corruption, which he rejects to 'plough his own furrow'. This includes listening to the local preacher's message of hell-fire, which he finds morally unacceptable as well. Guess he'll have to plough his own furrow! Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont is like a drug-induced account of an ethereal trip through a European Summertime by balloon - possibly the most intellectual track yet and a favorite of mine. Snowball in Negative concludes the album with a truly melancholic comparison between life slowly ebbing away, a snowball in negative (i.e. rolling on but getting smaller instead of bigger (if only!)), and failing to give up smoking, where the way the cigarette burns down also forms a parallel.

I suppose there's something of Monty-Python in The Divine Comedy. At one level it's excellent, correctly identifying the absurdities of life with a certain intellectual rigour. However, one wonders whether the attempt to find meaning in life is prematurely shelved in the Morrisey-like indulgence of self-pitiousness - which of course is also mocked and so can't be that bad can it? It's so true of the British that when it comes to the truly 'deep' thought that one needs to dig oneself out of nihilism - whether melancholic, humorous, or both - we just leave it to the Europeans and have another Pims. Afterall - to sacrifice one's world-weariness - well, it just isn't done my dear boy.

On a musical note, electric and double-bass player Simon Little has recently appeared on an altogether more hopeful and just as musically brilliant project with new senstation, Julie McKee - alongside Nigel Price from the James Taylor Quartet. The album in question is called, 'What a Woman Shouldn't Do' - which I prefer even to 'Victory for the Comic Muse'!

DIVINE INTERVENTION
Neil Hannon operates in a world of his own. Under the moniker of the Divine Comedy he has racked up a string of hit singles and albums, won the critics over and now has a sizeable following in The Uk, Ireland and accross many parts of Europe. He writes intelligent, baroque and insanely catchy songs all sung in a distinctive and unique baratone. Hannon's voice has become his calling card and on Victory For The Comic Muse he is in fine form.
Apparently written during down time on the DC tour to support Absent Friends, this collection has an urgency and vibrancy missing from the bands last two studio albums. It's also Hannon's most accessible release since Cassanova in the mid 90's.
Things kick off in fine style with the rumbling 'To Die A Virgin' - a driving rocker full of winning lyrical couplets and a magnificent deadpan vocal. 'Mother Dear' is a surprisingly straight ahead sunny strummer with a huge chorus and 'Diva Lady' a catchy piano lead swipe at the famous and shallow, chock full of mirth inducing one liners.
The DC even pull off a successful Beachboys pastiche with the beautiful 'Light Of Day' - undoubtably one of the bands best songs of the last ten years. The Associates vocal acrobatics are tempered on a great cover of 'Party Fears Too' - yes NH does pull it off - whilst 'Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World is a rubbish title but a brilliant song.
It all becomes a little too oddball and self indulgent towards the end of the CD but the final track 'SnowBall In Negative' is lovely.
If there is a more erudite lyricist operating in the UK at the moment then i'd be very surprised. That Hannon also possesses THAT voice and a unique gift for songwriting makes him a true 'one off'. Not a bad keyboard/guitarist either. Smart Arse.


cw

Simply Divine
I love The Divine Comedy. I love the fact that they're posh, clever, effete - all the things you're not supposed to be in the grubby world of rock 'n' roll. Unafraid to use a phrase like "bourgeois malaise", Neil Hannon may occasionally come across like Little Lord Fauntleroy but reahlly daahling, who would you rather be stuck in a lift with, him or The Hoosiers?

'Victory For The Comic Muse' is another superb collection of arch, literate pop but this time with an added ingredient - heart. 'A Lady Of A Certain Age' is typical of this new-found empathy. In a series of beautiful, rhyming couplets, Hannon paints a devastating portrait of a privileged life crushed by failure and disappointment: poignant, anguished and dripping with pathos, it's Hannon's masterpiece.

The album opens with a cheeky steal from 'The Camomile Lawn', with two bright young things discussing losing their virginity, before Hannon unfolds his funny tale of a frustrated adolescent trying to pop his cherry - "You don't know how much I need you/ The Handy Andy's I've been through....."

'Diva Lady' is a spot-on pop at certain stars, their preposterous demands and vacuous posing. On 'The Light Of Day' Hannon's swaps his trademark irony for something simple, direct and affecting - and it works a treat.
'Arthur C.Clarke's Mysterious World' and 'Mother Dear' are smart, spritely pop songs, zinging with hooks and humour.

18 years in and Mr.Hannon's 'comic muse' shows no sign of deserting him.