The new Divine Comedy record, Rainy Sunday Afternoon is a lovely fit for Autumnal change, for crisp leaves and ochre pigments. There are valedictions and refound pleasures, Neil Hannon is alternately wry and forlorn on this record, but he’s consistently open-hearted. Therefore it accords with previous great works, Absent Friends and Foreverland. The writing is tremendous, the minor key has dominion and there’s a trove of admirable confessions and pensées.
Figures grow faint and then start to vanish. ‘The Last Time I Saw the Old Man’ is a tender response to advancing decrepitude, an allusion to his father’s demise from Alzheimer’s. ‘The Man Who Turned into a Chair’ is a tale of the unexpected. There’s a brasher tone with ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ as a character is consumed by internet decay:
“Mr Bitter slowly slipped away
We lost a little more of him each day
First his feet then his legs
Then his heart, then his head
Until just one hand survived
To wave his friends and family bye bye.”
‘I Want You’ is an attractive nocturne, arranged with grace. ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ references the work of Carson McCullers but the music takes us back to the indie disco and a well-worn copy of The Cure’s ‘Lullabye’. No complaints there. Likewise with the hymnal tones of ‘Can’t Let Go’.
Neil Hannon by Kevin Westenberg
Meantime, ‘Mar-a-Lago By the Sea’ is loungecore exotica, with steely asides.
“Cheating losers on the greens
Swapping wives for beauty queens
Making turgid wedding speeches
Entertaining fascist leeches.”
And then Neil Hannon ties everything together with ‘Invisible Thread’ a song about parenthood and maturing years, a bookend to the baby bliss of ‘Charmed Life’, 21 years before. The joy remains and his art is fit to serve.
Anthony Toner, Long Long Way
Anthony Toner is another artist who can make use of the reverie, the aching recall. His new record, Long Long Way, swerves around melancholia and tales of survival. The jobbing musician in ‘Good People’ revisits bad times on country roads when a security check might be the prelude to murder:
“And if some stranger with a red light should step out into the road,
in the lonely space out there between the towns,`
that split second decision could make your blood run cold
– should I be speeding up or slowing down?”
Anthony is an impeccable player and he picks a J.J. Cale groove for ‘It Almost Caught Me In Its Jaws’. Yet the easy demeanour disguises the anxiety that swells from the lyric, causing discord. Elsewhere, the edgy sentiments rise from the unsaid words or the disjointed responses of online comms. ‘Private Ward’ is a doomy stopover. With ‘Address Book’, the old folk sit together and “cross out the names of the dead”.
Long Long Way sounds like a record that was wrestled into life, that doesn’t willingly turn to the light. But ‘Good People’ is the song you come back to – the artist on a resilient journey, passing the “nasty little secrets” in the back roads yet enlivened by a clumsy hug from a comrade musician with pungent aftershave. Elegance is over-rated. Untidy love is the essential.
Stuart Bailie
(Anthony Toner info here)
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