Pitchfork

Please forgive Neil Hannon for taking three years to record a follow-up to 2001's Regeneration. In the interim, he's had to deal with the dissolution of the band whose lineup had seemingly solidified for that effort, but more importantly, he's become a father, so he's understandably had other things to attend to. There's also the little matter of deciding where he wanted to go next-- the band he'd assembled in 2001 was the first true rock lineup The Divine Comedy had had since their nascent days as a jangly three-piece in Northern Ireland (their short album Fanfare for the Comic Muse is actually quite good, though Hannon has disowned it). The breakup of the Regeneration band was assumed by many to be the death of the Divine Comedy moniker, but Hannon apparently realized that it would be pointless to go on without the tag that had effectively become his pseudonym.

The decision to keep the name makes sense on more than a business level. Absent Friends is a sort of quintessential distillation of The Divine Comedy's many phases, Hannon handling the production and most of the instruments himself while longtime cohort Joby Talbot conducts the orchestra, which is here back to full prominence. Hannon has always probed for that part of each of us, no matter how well hidden, that swoons for sap and melts for melodrama using the clichés of six or seven decades of pop songwriting to frame the modern era in its own ridiculousness. This formula is pure poison for people who take themselves too seriously-- which, if you ask me, is all the more reason to like it.

Even if you're resistant to Hannon's grandiosity, it's hard to deny the lush sweep of the album's opening title track, a song that confirms his place as the closest thing to an inheritor of Scott Walker's mantle as we're likely to get. The orchestration is expert and economical, and Nigel Godrich, bumped from the producer's chair to the mixing board this time around, perfectly stacks the song's elements to make them sound absolutely huge. Hannon's tenor is commanding, and he spins an incredible melody as he runs through a series of tributes to 20th century icons whose lives ended prematurely, from French actress Jean Seberg to Laika, the first dog in space.

"Absent Friends" is just one of several songs on Absent Friends that rank among The Divine Comedy's finest. "Come Home Billy Bird" no doubt has autobiographical implications relating to touring with a band, but Hannon puts them onto a business traveler, whose harried, hungover ordeal at the airport prompts him to give it all up. Hannon captures the blur of international travel with a sticky, hurried melody and hilariously poignant lyrics regarding drinking games with Belgian business partners, cab rides that are more tortoise than hare, and inadequate seating.

Elsewhere, Hannon is at his most lovesick, as he intones over dizzying strings on "Sticks & Stones": "You and I go together like the molar and the drill/ Flesh is weak but darling we know/ That the ego's weaker still." But thematically, there's little that competes with "The Happy Goth", a song that moves effortlessly between Latin-tinged passages, Brill Building pop explosions, and an insidiously catchy minor-key chorus. The song essentially consists of Hannon telling parents not to get too worked up about all the time their teenage daughter is spending alone in her room, but the way he couches it in out-of-touch terms that parents might understand (he calls her boots "Doctor Martens") makes it both humorous and strangely sympathetic to the parents' concerns.

There's an oddly American perspective to "The Freedom Road", a hushed trucker's song that bobs along on a throbbing bassline, perhaps a testament to Hannon's extended cross-continent tours of North America, while closer "Charmed Life" is a sweet message to his daughter, as well as a very unsongwriterly admission that life hasn't actually been so bad after all. Hannon does slip a bit on "Leaving Today" and "The Wreck of the Beautiful", two dirges that feel labored-- he's always insisted on having one or two of these songs on each of his records, and they inevitably kill the momentum, though "Leaving Today" does thankfully avoid the morbid existentialism of so many of his slowest songs.

So after years of Hannon the Bookworm, Hannon the Lover, Hannon the Romantic, and Hannon the Humorist, we now have Hannon the Dad, and it runs out that he was a little bit of each all along-- he had just never found a way to put all of his tendencies in the same place at once. Absent Friends isn't my favorite Divine Comedy record (Fin de Siecle, actually), but it is an excellent record, and one that seems more likely to appeal to non-fans than his more ostentatious outings.