Damon Gough always was a little too precious.
The splotches of uneven facial hair decorating his plump face reeked of the apathetic/tortured singer-songwriter archetype co-opted from Elliot Smith. The adorable little knit beanie permanently adorning his shaggy head and the unbuttoned flannels drowning his hunched body tried to legitimize him to the espresso generation. And of course he insisted on calling himself Badly Drawn Boy -- way profound, man.
However easy it was to dismiss him, to write him off as another product of the Institution of British Hype (where have thou gone, jj72?), "The Hour of Bewilderbeast" managed to rise above it all.
The 2000 debut may have worn its Beatles and Nick Drake jones on its sleeve, but the whole, entwined with an aura of enchantment, added up to more than the sum of its parts. The hushed chamber pop looked with earnest delusions of grandeur past the restrictions of its production value and the traditional genre boundaries, instead following its muse on a divergent path for nearly every song. "Bewilderbeast" was the sound of an artist whose mind went in dozens of directions and whose ambition forced him to follow it without losing sight of a final vision.
Unfortunately, success reaped more misapplied big-label money, a big studio producer and big artistic failure as Gough managed to mislay critical affection faster than Gomez with this year's inane soundtrack to "About a Boy." Nearly everything that had made his debut so charming was sacrificed with the assistance of Tom "Glen Ballard of Indie Rock" Rothrock, whose production motto seems to be "More is More" (see: Smith's "Figure 8").
The emotional gravit
s of "Bewilderbeast" yielded to half-formed fits of foolishness and sensitively bare love drool. The baroque folk-pop, dense without being suffocating, morphed into cheesy pre-programmed beats, tacky synthesizers and the utter absence of even a glimmer of the masterfully brewed mood displayed on "Stone on the Water" or "Once Around the Block." "Bewilderbeast" was timeless, "About a Boy" lifeless.
But while mediocre, specially commissioned soundtracks have been precursors to creative decline (Air's "Virgin Suicides"), they're usually just artistic aberrations resulting from their forced, dependant creation (Jeff Tweedy's "Chelsea Walls"). "Have You Fed The Fish?," Gough's proper follow-up, thus arrives under an ominous shadow of reservation with the encumbering question of whether "About a Boy" was an anomaly.
Befitting of an artist whose very name hints at ambiguity, Badly Drawn Boy answers with a resounding
maybe.
While not as awful as "About a Boy," "Have You Fed The Fish?" isn't much better -- instead of improving upon the soundtrack's faults, he just disguises them better.
Gough appears fraught with conflict, both internal and external.
Internally, he's having some troubles dealing with stardom. On "You Were Right," his "American Pie," his lyrical whim finds him musing on rock's fallen heroes ("I remember doing nothing the night Sinatra died and the night Jeff Buckley died
"), musical significance ("Songs are never quite the answer, just a soundtrack to a life that is over way too soon") and celebrity fantasies ("I'm turning Madonna down / I'm calling it my best move / I'll get her a ticket to what she needs"). "How can I find time to be with you again? / How can I give you the answers you need when all I possess is a melody?," he questions of himself on "How?"
While lacking the wit and expressive depth of his earliest work, at least his inner-searching songs steer clear of the sappy, overly coy emotional Spam that dominates most of the album. "The keys to your heart open the door to the world / You've got to give me two days and, woman, I'll make you a girl," he sings (as the album's first line!), invoking Barry Manilow and turning red the faces of anyone who once labeled him the British Beck.
Musically the album is as promiscuous as anything he's done, but where it felt exciting and organically fresh before, now it's painfully forced. With Rothrock back behind the boards, a sleazy slickness coats each song. Songs creep along escorted by bells and lofty strings ("Bedside Story") or prance to a downy sambaing rhythm ("The Further I Slide") or even giddily rip-off "Sgt. Pepper's" with reckless abandon ("Tickets to What You Need"), but it's an entirely heartless endeavor more concerned with style than substance.
Instead of giving each song its own atmosphere, the glut of instruments, no matter how deftly played, drowns out any vibrant personality, damning each song to a sweet but hollow sentence.
Unlike the hopeless "About a Boy, "the most painful element of "Have You Fed the Fish" is how much Gough's talent screams through all of his overt grasps at eccentricity, all of his egomaniacal desires to show off his versatility, all of his appeasements to everyone's precious image of him.
When Gough finds out how simply to please himself again, he'll find everyone else will be, too.
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