Inner circle

No paradise for the Divine Comedy

by Charles Taylor

British pop is often dismissed as "style obsessed," meaning calculated, soulless, and shallow; it's treated as the ear candy we occasionally submit to until an American comes along to show us how things should be done.

But if it's true that many of the bands in the current Britpop revival have modeled their sound -- and even their look -- on other artists, it's also not difficult to hear that their music is anything but heartless. The heart of Oasis's music comes from Noel Gallagher's loving dedication to pop songcraft. On the latest Blur album, the heart lies in Damon Albarn's determination to echo the shaggy, do-it-yourself freedom that attracts him to Pavement and Beck (even if he ends up sounding like a cross between Ian Hunter and Alex Chilton). Suede's Coming Up derives its drama from singer Brett Anderson's simultaneous desire to join the young ravers he sees and his knowledge of the disappointments and compromises that await them. Even the nastiest of these bands, Pulp, whose music seems cold to the touch, are capable of the hurt and class resentment of the magnificent "Common People." Elsewhere, lead singer Jarvis Cocker lets the messiness of desire and rejection creep into his pointed lyrics.

On the other hand, if Neil Hannon ever decided he wanted a heart, I'm sure it would be the finest one money could buy. Hannon, the Ulsterman (he's from Derry) who is the Divine Comedy, makes the influences on his sound and sensibility as plain as the information in a Vogue spread that tells you where to buy each piece of a featured outfit. He's motivated by '60s British pop of the Petula Clark variety; Noel Coward's dry-ice bitchiness; the current vogue for lounge music; Brechtian alienation technique; the put-on air of early Roxy Music; the bombastic, masochistic flagellation of Anthony Newley's show music; and the melodrama of Scott Walker's baritone at its most godawful. Casanova (Setanta), the Divine Comedy's third album, is a set of lush, orchestrated songs about a roué making his way from conquest to conquest, taking care never to become so passionate as to break a sweat or muss his ruffled shirt. Occasionally he breaks into crocodile tears as showy and insincere as those cried by a televangelist after he's been found with his hand in some cookie's jar.

The album opens with a parody of a swinging English cocksman that's funnier than almost anything in Austin Powers. Over the sound of two girls giggling, Hannon, oozing confident randiness in a low, rolling voice, says "Hell-lo. Ooo, I say, how about a kiss?" It's not as forward as "C'mon bay-be, let's shag!", but it amounts to the same thing. With titles like "In and Out in Paris and London" and lyrics like "Something in his heart told him to come clean . . . something in his jeans told him to pretend," Casanova is undeniably clever. Finally, though, it's not much more than that.

There's an undeniable subtext of self-loathing here, though it's offered so floridly that it becomes one more part of the Casanova's scam. It's tough to buy Hannon's claim to be exposing "the casualties of casual sex" when the rake always has the upper hand and the last word. That the victims are even more predatory than the Casanova (in the opening track, "Something for the Weekend," the woman lures him to a woodshed where her accomplices tie him up and rob him) feels less like part of the joke than like arrogant self-involvement. At its worst, in "The Frog Princess," Casanova is unbearably smug (and "frog" here also means "French"): "And now I'm rid of her I must confess/To thinking 'bout what might have been/And I can visualize my frog princess/Beneath a shining guillotine").

It didn't have to be. Others have gotten at the empty heart of Casanova without the implicit self-pity or snobbishness Hannon resorts to here. Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs did it with black irony last year in a creepy, slow-tempo version of "If I Only Had a Heart." Bryan Ferry inhabited the role of continental lover only to expose his character as a broken-hearted romantic. And right now on Broadway, in a production of Dion Boucicault's 19th-century farce London Assurance, the peerless Brian Bedford plays a preening (and finally endearing) aging ladies' man with such relish that it becomes a form of generosity, an invitation to the audience to join him in a laugh at his expense.

No one who makes an album that sounds as good as Casanova does is without talent. Neil Hannon has a genuine knack for orchestrated pop music. But his presentation is so calculated that there's no mystery or other layers left to uncover. When he sings "Once there was a time when my mind lay on higher things," you think, yeah, a bodice instead of a hemline.