Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Infectious Pop, July 14, 2000
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.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Never been to Europe, October 25, 2001
And yet, this gem makes me feel like I have. It's like Neil Hannon invented a brand new sound system, and called it "Eurovision". It makes you capable of catching every melody before the first verse is over. It compells you to follow the sardonic storytelling. It forces you to whistle and tap to the tunes. And then, it begins with what it does best: it surrounds you, gets under your pores, and places you in the middle of that half-lit street, staring at one of the stunning girls at the other side of the window of that coffee shop. Atmosphere, they call it, and here it explodes. From the laughter at the beggining of "Something for the Weekend", to the horno-graphic climax in "A Woman of the World", going through the double morality of "The Frog Princess", this is love, seduction and a game of push-pull temptation at its best. Better yet, the album (at least the edition I have does) includes "The Casanova Companion", collecting some songs from previous ones, as well as a couple of unreleased live performances, including a magnificent version of the American Music Club's "Johnny Mathis's Feet". Here, "Tonight we fly" got hold of me. A perfectly crafted tune, which can make you cry on a lonely friday night, laugh with the wind in your hair on saturday morning with the car rooftop down, or find you reminiscing on a sunday afternoon. Kind of a wild card. Sometimes, there's more to the flat, cold physical appearance of a disc.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
naughty but sad, January 4, 1998
By A Customer
This is a rather extraordinary CD: a concept album (wait! don't stop reading yet!) loosely based on the life of Casanova, but "set" mainly in modern England. An eccentric, epic, cynical, sad, and lust-drenched record, it stands out amongst the current crop of English Beatles sound-alikes and ambient/jungle/triphoppers. Casanova is odd, manic, meditative, self-indulgent, and very funny. It's also full of good music and great tunes. After opening with two absolutely killer pop songs, awash with hooks, the album becomes steadily stranger and more imaginative, with lush orchestrations, quotations from La Marseillaise, celestas, and lyrics pointing to the emptiness of a life led in sensuousness, but without love ("I don't love anybody, that stuff is just a waste of time/Your place or mine?"). This latter aspect is summarized in the penultimate track, a five and a half minute Burt Bacharach-style instrumental that begins with a BBC presenter list of credits and then builds towards a crescendo that it never quite reaches, fizzling out at the end. Casanova was released in Europe almost 2 years ago, but it still sounds a lot fresher than almost anything else that's around. About a minute into the first track, Neil Hannon (who is the Divine Comedy) lecherously tells two giggling girls "Oh come on, you know you want to" in a horribly smarmy upper class English accent. And the thing is, after this, I do. P.S. Look out for the Divine Comedy's Scott Walker-esque E.P., A Short Album About Love. END
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Interact With Your Music: Discover, listen to, and buy new music, all from the pages of SPIN's digital edition, free to Amazon customers.
~ The Divine Comedy
~ The Divine Comedy
~ The Divine Comedy
~ The Divine Comedy
~ The Divine Comedy
See all 11 tracks on this disc
by The Divine Comedy 
