Chamber-pop with a bit of Brit-pop flair

“Iknow I’m good at what I do,” says Neil Hannon in the 2021 BBC One documentary Neil Hannon : 30 Years of the Divine Comedy. “I know I’m bad at most other things.”

What does Hannon do? Under the name the Divine Comedy, he crafts impeccable chamber-pop with a distinctly Brit-pop flair, 35 prime examples of which are gathered in the three-disc edition of his new best-of-and-then-some Charmed Life: The Best of the Divine Comedy. How good is he at what he does? So good that Charmed Life’s 11 new recordings easily hold their own against the 23 previously released highlights, only eight of which were anthologized on his first (and now 23-year-old) best-of-and-then-some, A Secret History.

Over half of those highlights, by the way, hit the UK Top 40. And the British Phonographic Industry has certified a third of his 12 studio albums either gold or silver. Not bad for a fellow who grew up as the shy, sensitive, and bookish son of a Northern Irish Anglican cleric.

But if Hannon is so good at what he does, why after all these years hasn’t he developed a significant U.S. following? Could it be that he’s actually too good? Or might his “Brit-pop” simply be too “Brit”?

Possibly both.

Americans, for instance, haven’t known what to do with a songwriter who chooses his words with the wit and precision of a Cole Porter since Cole Porter.

Furthermore, Americans haven’t fetishized public transportation in song since Arlo Guthrie rode “City of New Orleans” onto the charts 50 years ago. Yet beating the blues with a bus ride is the subject of Hannon’s biggest hit, “National Express.”

Or perhaps he’s too subtle. Consider “Generation Sex.” What sounds at first like a celebration of pornography turns out to be a fairly conservative indictment of the objectification of women, with Hannon concluding that “we really should know better.” And “Those Pesky Kids,” one of Charmed Life’s new songs, could easily be mistaken by anyone not wearing his thinking cap for a paean to Scooby-Doo instead of the paean to defiantly idealistic youth that it is.

The most profound of the new batch is “The Best Mistakes,” a kind of “My Way” unburdened by hubris and melodrama. The funniest (and the most Cole Porter–like) is “Te Amo España,” in which Hannon rhymes random Spanish expressions while imagining a post-lockdown time when he’ll “drive down to Spain to say hola again.”

The funniest and most profound: “Who Do You Think You Are,” in which Hannon employs Auto-Tune to convince the hominids in 2001: A Space Odyssey that evolution really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.