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The Divine ComedyAbsent Friends Parlophone/EMI 'Absent Friends' is not just the best Divine Comedy album since 1996's 'Casanova' - which it undoubtedly is - but it's also where Neil Hannon seemingly accepts his fate as the heir apparent to the throne of Scott Walker, re-discovering the lush orchestrations and soaring vocals that characterised the first four DC albums. And, frankly, it's about goddam time: Hannon is an astonishingly emotive singer and a fine songwriter, but palls when he turns his hand to wry social commentary (cf: Generation Sex and National Express on 1999's confused 'Fin de Sicèle'); and while 2001's 'Regeneration' was a step in the right direction, marrying Hannon's croon with Nigel Godrich's clipped post-Radiohead production was more often interesting than marvellous. However, a flourish of strings announces the arrival of the seventh Divine Comedy album (the first since disbanding the "band" version that Hannon has worked with since the late nineties). He is in glorious voice on the title track, paying tribute to a series of absent "friends" (including Oscar Wilde, Jean Seberg, cigarette advertising mascot Woodbine Willie and Laika, the first dog in space) in a song that builds to a crescendo of strings and brass, arranged by longtime collaborator Joby Talbot. Talbot has long been the Comedy's secret weapon and 'Absent Friends' shows exactly why: his deft, elegant arrangement to Sticks & Stones gives Hannon's voice room to soar over the trademark accordian of French composer Yann Tierson, while his sweeping orchestrations raise a drunken make-out session to the level of high romance in Our Mutual Friend. Of course, such superb touches would count for nothing if Hannon hadn't also written his strongest material in a decade. The sense of humour is still present (after all, this is the chap who wrote the faux-Eurovision entry My Lovely Horse for 'Father Ted'), but he's toned it down to wry couplets like "Her clothes are blacker than the blackest cloth / And her face is whiter than the snows of Hoth" in the surprisingly sympathetic The Happy Goth. The upbeat Come Home Billy Bird is a classic DC single; Hannon's tale of a travelling businessman rushing home to see his son play football segues perfectly out of the chamber strings-and-harp arrangement of Leaving Today. Both songs characterise the ache of parenthood (Hannon and wife Orla became parents not long before album came out) but the coup de grace is the closing Charmed Life, a song wishing his daughter the same joys as her father. Not only is the album a musical return to form for Hannon, the album's cover is a stylistic echo of the languid William Morris romanticism of his early 90s masterpieces 'Liberation' and 'Promenade.' If there is any justice in the world, 'Absent Friends' would be a worldwide smash. There's not, and it won't, but it still just might be the best album you'll hear this year.  |
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