RECENT REVIEWS:

The Pixies
Death to the Pixies
Elektra
(10/20/97)

Various Artists
The End of Violence Soundtrack
Outpost Records
(10/17/97)

Steve Earle
El Corazón
E-squared/Warner Bros.
(10/16/97)

Joe Henderson
Porgy & Bess
Verve
(10/15/97)

Lee Feldman
Living it All Wrong
Pure/Mercury
(10/13/97)

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Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
True blue tributes
(09/19/97)

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There's nothing like meeting superstars to puncture your illusions about fame and glamour.Talk about the rock stars you've met in the Music section of Table Talk.

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Almost Heaven:
John Denver 1943-1997
Dawn Eden remembers the man whose music left no room for cynicism (10/14/97)

++++++++++divine comedy
+++C A S A N O V A
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And there's that line in Petula Clark's "Downtown," where a gentle bossa nova is waiting for you, and then it drifts out from somewhere and does its magic, or whatever. That one never fails to get me all misty-eyed. It's stupid, I know.

But there's really something about that line -- something melancholy and profound. Tell me if this makes sense to you: When we grew up and went out to meet it, the bossa nova wasn't waiting for us anymore. All the music that was around when we were children -- all the pop standards that were still on the radio, and the great vocalists that our parents were into, and all that -- just isn't there anymore, except as "retro." Everything's rock now. And now that we've matured a little and we're wanting something that's still tasty, but a little bit more adult than, say, Van Halen or the Sex Pistols or something, all we get is a dial tone -- or a sneer. If you're not a little bit upset over that, you've probably forgotten what you're missing.

Neil Hannon (aka Divine Comedy) might help bring back some memories. Hannon is a pop vocalist in the Scott Walker mold -- and roundly hated as a pretentious upstart, especially at home in Britain. He's a young guy, not too good-looking, who affects a sort of globe-trotting Cinzano-and-shades style that nobody's been able to pull off successfully since Sean Connery stopped playing Bond. He's (let's be honest) a pale-faced creep and a bounder, pulling a phony trust-fund act when he really grew up in some terrible place in Northern Ireland. They don't much go for that sort of thing over there; there's probably an effigy of him hanging in every major city in Britain.

But what a wonderful spectacle it all makes. "Casanova," his third album, is a big-ticket, technicolor Alfa Romeo ride through a landscape of antique Eurochic, moody sensuality and unfiltered cigarettes. It's an exquisitely detailed adult-pop album that's as fresh as anything else on the market today, but that's nearly as true to form as a genuine early-'60s male-vocal album. What pushes "Casanova" over the edge of greatness isn't that Hannon is singularly adept at what he does (he's a pale, weasely guy with a B+ voice), or even that he takes his posturing especially seriously (who could?). It's that Divine Comedy, perhaps alone among all modern lounge-rock bands, isn't loungey -- and isn't a rock band. While "Something for the Weekend," for example, covers similar ground as the Cardigans' "Love Me," Hannon matches the Cardigans' twee guitarishness with wide, theater-style instrumentation and big concert-hall sound. While our domestic "cocktail nation" acts will pull out a Mellotron to whip up some syrupy strings, "Casanova" lets loose with an honest-to-God orchestra, with parts carefully arranged by Hannon himself. He's not fooling around here, folks -- this is the real thing. And no matter how fresh it sounds on the surface (it all sounds fresh on the surface), nearly every scrap of it comes from outside of the teen-pop current that's dominated music since the Beatles. It'll have you wondering why there was nothing like this waiting for us when we first became ready for it.
SALON | Oct. 21, 1997