Becoming More Like Alfie

The Divine Comedy at its most impishly literary arrives in a song built around a cultural reference so specific it functions almost as a password for a certain kind of knowing listener. The arrangement is characteristically plush — strings that drift rather than surge, a rhythm section deployed with restraint, the whole production carrying the slightly overstuffed elegance of a very well-appointed sitting room. Hannon adopts his most deadpan persona here, the narrator watching a particular masculine archetype with a mixture of envy and amusement. The Alfie of the title — that charming, careless, commitment-allergic figure of 1960s British cinema — becomes a lens for examining a type of man who moves through the world leaving pleasant wreckage. The vocal delivery is studied nonchalance, each line dropped with the timing of someone who has rehearsed appearing unrehearsed. What makes it sting gently is the self-implication: the song never fully condemns what it describes, which raises the question of whether the narrator is critiquing or secretly admiring, or whether the distance between those two positions has narrowed uncomfortably. Best heard on a late afternoon when you're feeling more sophisticated than circumstances warrant.