Casanova

by

The Divine Comedy

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I came to the Divine Comedy by way of Ute Lemper's "Punishing Kiss," on which the three Neil Hannon/Joby Talbot compositions are easily the highlights. I then rushed to buy "Casanova," which turns out to be a slyly subversive, yet genuinely infectious collection of pop tunes that bespeaks such diverse influences as Noel Coward and Scott Walker. Hannon's singing voice is a stylish, honeyed baritone, yet it is his spoken words that first seduce the listener; his lead-in to "Something for the Weekend" is, alone, worth the price of the CD. Among the other tunes, I especially like "Frog Princess," whose sampling of the "Marseillaise" adds another, comic, layer of meaning to its title, and "When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe," with its homage to New Wave cinema of the '50s and '60s and its dig at the parochialism of American film-making ("Paramount was never Universal"). Perhaps it is Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" that Hannon has in mind when he next serves up "Your Daddy's Car." Such subtleties aside, however, what we are left with is the magic of instant pop classics such as "Tonight we Fly," which, in a better world, would take its place beside "Waterloo Sunset" and "Penny Lane" as one of pop's finest moments.