The Divine Comedy - Regeneration (CD 2001)

This 2001 offering from the great Divine Comedy marks a change of style and tone for the band. It was also released to the full marketing trumpeting the label could muster for the band. Was it last chance saloon for the Divine Comedy? Did Neil Hannon want to have a want a proper putsch at the big time? Whatever it was, this is not the Divine Comedy familiar from the previous albums.

Slimmed down to a tight indie band from the usual amorphous collective headed by Neil Hannon there is none of the usual whimsy and amusement that brought the band fame. Rather we have a darker, more critical album driven by guitars and drums rather than soaring strings and jaunty piano. Songs on the album include an attack on religious hypocrisy (Eye of the Needle), the trend towards shallowness in modern society (Dumb it Down) and the tyranny of media portrayals of beauty, fashion and fame (The Beauty Regime). There are no comedy characters or seaside postcard musings.

Although a break from the norm, this is an excellent album that unfairly has a somewhat tarnished reputation with some fans. Three of the singles from the album all have considerable merit, even if they didn’t necessarily set the hit parade alight. ‘Bad Ambassador’ in particular is an amusing testimony from someone who thinks they might want to trade in their moral, considerate life for something more dangerous and powerful: from downshifter to rat-race. ‘Perfect Lovesong’ and ‘Love What You Do’ too are both compelling tunes.

The thread that runs through the Divine Comedy’s work is the quality of Neil Hannon’s lyrics and this album has the puns and plays you would expect but their town is more biting than playful. In ‘Love What You do’ he urges us to ‘exercise your freedoms and exorcise those demons’ and in Bad Ambassador he tells us ‘I wanna feel real, I wanna free wheel, I wanna steal the show from under their noses.’

What does the great leader of the Divine Comedy think of this album himself? It’s difficult to know, but when he played at the London Palladium after the release of Absent Friends, this was the only album that wasn’t represented on the play list. Perhaps Neil Hannon himself has disowned it?

I hope not. If you want to love the Divine Comedy, by all means start with Promenade, Fin de Siecle or Liberation, but when on a cold dark night you find the comedy and toe-tapping enthusiasm too much, dust off Regeneration and you’ll find it just the ticket.