Casanova

The Divine Comedy | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 2, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Setanta UK
• ASIN: B000069CO0
• Also Available in: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,946 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Japanese edition of their amazing 1997 album includes four bonus tracks, 'Comme Beaucoup De Messieurs' which is the rare French version of 'Becoming More Like Alfie', 'Birds Of Paradise Farm', 'Motorway To Damascus' & 'Love Is Lighter ThanAir'. The album --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Infectious Pop, July 14, 2000

By 

A. Hickman (Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Casanova (Audio CD)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Never been to europe, October 13, 2004

By 

Juan Luis Arteaga (Lima, Lima Peru) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Casanova (Audio CD)

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 Never been to Europe, October 25, 2001

By 

Juan Luis Arteaga (Lima, Lima Peru) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Casanova (Audio CD)

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.