It must be hard when the pinnacle of your career is writing the theme tune to Father Ted, but the reality is that Neil Hannon will be forever linked with Songs Of Love and My Lovely Horse while ever he fails to fulfil on the promise of his early career.

Victory For The Comic Muse is another nail in his coffin. It’s not that it’s a bad album musically, it’s simply that his tunes are overloaded with production and once more fail to hit the mark, and his oh-so-clever lyrics are starting to grate.

It’s the pretension, though, that really hammers his shortcomings. How can anyone love songs that go by the name of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World or Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont?

Yet when he drops that foppish wit and brings things down a peg or two, like on Diva Lady, a song he’s admitted is far from being his most intelligent, that affable air that breezed through Becoming More Like Alfie or National Express wafts once more from the speakers.

Given the swathes of strings and over-complicated verses that litter Victory… maybe it’s time that Hannon considered a change of tack. If the Man From La Mancha rhythms of The Plough or the Brigadoon longings of The Light Of Day are anything to go by, it’s surely time for Divine Comedy – The Musical. Anything would be better than having to suffer another half-hearted album.


Chris Long - BBC Manchester