New Divine Comedy album "Victory For The Comic Muse" to be released June 19

i'm really not sure why, but i find "a lady of a certain age" phenomenally moving. it takes a hell of a songwriter to take a conceit like that and make it really work; not just as a wry coward-esque commentary but as a genuinely affecting vignette. it might be the accordion - i'm a sucker for accordions - but there's something in that song somewhere which breaks my heart. utterly beautiful; one of my favourite songs of the year without a doubt.

the melody, i think, reminds me slightly of "bishonen" by oor ain momus. there's a touch of the michael nyman in there too.

[hey, fuck me. there's a whole thread on here about bishonen. wow. in which momus refers to the systems-music aspect of it ... yes, this all slots into place.]

anyway. i'm surprised and delighted with this whole album.

should I get this?

I gave it a couple of listens and it didn't do much for me. Grimly's kinda otm about "a lady of a certain age" and the last track ain't bad but too much of the rest of it seems overly whimsical and insubstantial. The Associates cover is exactly what you'd expect but is ultimately disappointing, lacking entirely the bite of the original.

I love "a lady of a certain age"

"Lady of a Certain Age" is as great as everyone is saying. The whole album is pretty good. I like "Mother Dear" a lot. The Associates cover is kinda dull; like ledge says, it doesn't have any of that weird, mysterious whatever-it-is that makes the Associates version so fantastic.

I hear 'Absent Friends' was rather good

Another big thumbs up for "Lady of a Certain Age" - the rest of the tracks I sampled didn't grab me to nearly the same extent though.

very late to the party but A Lady of a Certain Age is one of the best songs i've heard in ages.

do ILX still like this guy? i lost my way with him after Absent Friends pretty much..

I still love this guy.

Absent Friends was his last great album. A Lady of a Certain Age is one of the best songs he's written. There's some other good stuff on the album but it was a big step down from Absent Friends. He's only released one album since (Bang Goes the Knighthood in 2010) which was really bad. Sounded like he'd completely run out of ideas and there were too many songs where he just listed things instead of writing proper lyrics.

Aw, there were some decent tracks on "Bang Goes the Knighthood," even if it leaned more toward the novelty-song side of TDC. "Down in the Street Below," "Assume the Perpendicular," and "The Lost Art of Conversation" were all fairly strong, I thought.

I was a huge DC fan throughout the 90s but I thought Fin de Siecle was a big disappointment. Things looked up for a while with Regeneration (a much underrated album) but I thought Absent Friends was awful and I stopped following him at that point. Sounds like I should seek out "Lady of a Certain Age" though.

I'm a big fan of everything they did from Liberation to Absent Friends but then apart from the odd moment he seemed to run out of steam.

I do really like Down In The Street Below goodoldneon but apart from that not much else. I was heartbroken the first time I ever heard Indie Disco.

New album, _Office Politics_, comes out June 7th. Pre-order bonuses at the TDC site.

Missed out on the recent live album, _Loose Canon_, so ordered that today, too.

His last cd, "How Can You Leave Me on My Own" didn't do much for me as a first single, but hearing it and "To the Rescue" on a Jools Holland rerun yesterday, I'll revisit that disc. "To the Rescue" really jumped out as fantastic.

He averages one decent gravitas-laden track per album these days, To the Rescue was it for the last album. The new single is not it.