Promenade (Promenade - The Divine Comedy)

Member Name: davepridd

Product:	Promenade - The Divine Comedy
Date:	20/07/00 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great songs, arrangement, unique

Disadvantages: Slightly weak concept

This is the Divine Comedy's second album, and was released when the Divine Comedy was effectively Neil Hannon with a string quartet. These early albums show of his talented far better than the lavishly produced albums that he has since released. He plays a whole range of guitars and keyboard instruments, as well as singing and arranging strings and a few woodwind lines.

Although this album is supposed to be a concept album about two lovers spending a day at the seaside, the link can sometimes be a bit tenuous, either that or they are a distinctly weird couple, the sequence of events going; having a bath to get ready, nervously going to meet her, reading some books together, eating fish, running home in the rain, going to a fairground, going to the cinema, remembering their childhood, she goes for a swim, they get drunk, then it's nearly the end of the evening, and finally they fly away. It's obviously quite a long evening!

However ignoring the slightly feeble attempt at a concept, it is a very good album, containing some excellent tracks. The sound is like nothing else in modern music; quite often you could mistake it for classical music with the sound being based around piano and string quartet, or even harpsichord and string quartet. Thanks to Neil Hannon's skill at arrangement, he can always carry this through effectively and so the album sounds very accomplished, melodic and intricate, and he also presents a wide variety of dynamics from the gentle '10 seconds to midnight', to the up-tempo 'Drinking Song'.

The best tracks are probably the memorable 'Going downhill fast', which if it was released now would probably go top 10, the baroque sounding 'Neptune's daughter' and the very English sounding 'Tonight we fly'. Although the slightly more experimental stuff doesn't always quite match this quality, there isn't really a weak track here, which is remarkable for a o
ne-man band, and an album which does not have a credit for production.

Summary: