Art.of.the.dead.2019

In 1990 Neil Hannon started recording and releasing under the name The Divine Comedy. Thirty years and twelve great albums later, Hannon is rightly adjudged one of the finest singer songwriters of his generation. To celebrate, Divine Comedy Records are remastering and reissuing nine of the band's classic albums.

Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in 1548 in Avila, the birthplace of St Teresa. Just as she seems to personify the religious ethos of sixteenth-century Spain (the good side of it, at least), so Victoria came to embody the best of the Spanish character in music. As a youth he learnt his art as a chorister at the Cathedral of Avila. So promising was he that he was sent to Rome at seventeen years of age, patronised by Philip II and by the Church, to study at the Jesuits’ Collegium Germanicum…

This set pulls together all three albums from the pop-punk wannabies: Pop Art (1988), Velveteen (1989) and Little Magnets Versus The Bubble of Babble (1991). The last of those three is still unreleased in the UK on CD, so this is its debut on the format over here. Each long-player here comes with non-album bonus tracks and then three further CDs offer a wealth of seven-inch versions and extended remixes.

Seven years ago, Tomas Petterson started to write the masterpiece of Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio. Now it is finally finished: An album that crushes the borders of Neofolk with overwhelming musical sense and deep, poetic words. „Let‘s Play“ is more than the next album of this exceptional band, it is the rise for the stars and a sound-built manifest of art.