Produced by Nigel Godrich, known for his work with Radiohead, this album was distinctly different from frontman Neil Hannon's other work and was darker in tone than what the Divine Comedy's listeners had come to expect. It eschewed the orchestral-driven chamber pop the band was known for in favor of a more stripped down, guitar-focused style, slightly reminiscent of the band's debut album Fanfare for the Comic Muse. It is a more group-concentrated effort, hence the more organic sound.
For the seventh studio album Regeneration, Hannon made the decision to write a number of acoustic guitar demos and present them to his collaborators, instead of composing the entire song himself. Sitting in his garden while his house was refurnished, the crooner found inspiration in recent records that presented a combination of alternative rock and spacey ambience – Radiohead’s OK Computer, Beck’s Mutations, Travis’ The Man Who. Hannon wanted to play with the big boys and the angsty, political ‘acid pop’ of the era fit his desire to reinvent himself. It also allowed for him to abandon his usual tone of cheesy irony, which coated his previous records and probably rendered them a little harmless compared to the biting social critique in the line of Pulp or Blur.
Provided with an actual budget by his new major label, Hannon hired Nigel Godrich, whose involvement in the aforementioned ‘acid pop’ albums guaranteed attention and a new level of acoustic experimentation. It also meant that the majority of the recording sessions would be spent without Hannon, with Godrich concentrating on the large, shuffling cast of musicians that made up the band’s executive force ever since 1993's Liberation. As a consequence, there's less melodrama to be found on Regeneration. Instead, the individual musicians provide their own melodic interpretations of Hannon's skeletal ideas, coming up with an array of beautiful ideas and melodies. This was best observed in "Perfect Lovesong", whose additional harmonies directly reference Hannon's lyrical homage to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, or the impressive lead single "Love What You Do", which reached the heights of Radiohead's "No Surprises" for instance.
Regeneration was clearly The Divine Comedy's attempt at a definitive rock statement, and many of the songs pay tribute to the time they were made in. "Bad Ambassador" featured a guitar lead that sounds unlikely similar to that of Jonny Greenwood, and both "Dumb it Down" and "Lost Property" were incredibly close to Thom Yorke's composition style. Ironically, Hannon's vocal harmonies and overall songwriting aesthetic weren't all that different from his previous works – "Mastermind" or "Timestretched" could as well have been written during the era of Promenade or Casanova. And that's precisely what made Regeneration such a fascinating – and unique – record. Godrich, the band, and Hannon form a sort of aesthetic trinity, which bridged the aesthetics of Brian Eno's ambient stylization, Radiohead’s sound experimentation, and Scott Walker's early dandy classicism.
The album's closer "The Beauty Regime" was constructed precisely around this creative tension. Starting out with bare drums, guitar and Hannon’s voice, the song instrument by instrument incorporate other instruments like piano and strings, drifts off into other melodies, sees Hannon's voice rise as he intones. The instruments rise and build harmonies around each other as Hannon denounces the narratives of self-help books and beauty magazines and finally subside, to leave only Hannon and roughly 30 seconds of ambient field recording noises, somehow organically reconnecting with the beginning of the album’s first track.
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