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Badly Drawn Boy
One Plus One Is One
(Astralwerks)
T.J. Simon's #2 album for 2004
First Appeared in The Music Box, September 2004, Volume 11, #9
Written by John Metzger
Since his critically heralded debut The Hour of Bewilderbeast, Badly
Drawn Boy née Damon Gough has done everything in his power to avoid being
typecast as just another singer-songwriter from the slacker brigade, even though
in essence, he remains not only Britain’s belated response to Beck but also the
guy who played a huge role in paving the way for the likes of Damien Rice,
Sondre Lerche, and Simple Kid. In 2002, Gough did the unthinkable and released a
pair of exploratory efforts (Have You Fed the Fish? and the film
soundtrack to About a Boy), which found him moving in two different
directions without ever abandoning the core eclecticism of his baroque-infused
sound. His latest endeavor One Plus One Is One attempts to bridge the
gaps that separate all three outings, and for the most part, it succeeds. He
regains the fragility that made The Hour of Bewilderbeast so affecting
while losing the self-indulgence that threatened to undercut Have You Fed the
Fish?, and nowhere is this more evident than on the new collection’s title
track, which opens as lo-fi acoustic folk before blossoming into a brilliant
display of Beatle-esque pop.
As with his other outings, Gough binds his songs together through lyrical
ruminations on matters of the heart, and although the poems he penned for One
Plus One Is One at first appear simple (almost too much so), taken as a
whole, they paint a far more complex portrait that examines the multi-faceted
turbulence of intimate relationships with enough ambiguity as to lend credence
to the theory that he’s also speaking to the world at large. "It all boils down
to love and peace," Gough sings on the title track, a sentiment that also
reverberates through the community-building Year of the Rat as well as
the in memoriam phrases that permeate Takes the Glory. Elsewhere, he
sprinkles a few dabs of hope, filling Another Devil Dies with images from
It’s a Wonderful Life, and offering his best wishes for fulfilled dreams
on Four Leaf Clover. In essence, he seems to take strength from the
isolationism implied by the album’s given name, an intriguing twist that fuses
broken-hearted vulnerability with the optimism of a better tomorrow.
However, while one must admire his fondness for crafting ambitious conceptual
collections rather than disconnected streams of songs, it’s clear from One
Plus One Is One that Gough is still searching for his own voice. As a
result, his mannerisms sometimes are displayed awkwardly, and given the plethora
of ambient effects he employs, it’s safe to say that he also has a tendency to
overreach, missing the forest for the trees. It’s as if he knows which heroes’
spirits he wishes to invoke, but not quite how to bend them to his will or how
to tap their essence rather than their superficial ornamentations. Nick Drake,
John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, and Fairport Convention figure prominently, haunting
many of his songs, and try as he might, Gough just can’t seem to shake the
aforementioned allusions to Beck that peak around nearly every nook and cranny
of his work. Oddly enough, there’s also a hint of Jethro Tull tossed into the
mix — most notably on Summertime in Wintertime, a prog-rock tune that,
superbly performed as it is, erupts with such fury as to feel jarringly out of
synch within the confines of the rest of the album’s orchestrated, folk-pop
proceedings.
In other words, at this point, Gough’s vision is grander than his ability to
execute, and although his touchstones are all fine refuges in which to take
solace and find direction, he hasn’t succeeded in transforming them into an
identity that is decidedly his. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either,
especially since one suspects that he, too, understands this concept and is
reveling in his freedom to experiment in order to achieve artistic growth.
Indeed, despite its faults, One Plus One Is One is a step forward,
one in which nurtured refinement trumps Gough’s own eclectic nature, but
although it is a focused and cohesively grounded affair, it also unfortunately
just doesn’t have the seamlessly organic flow that made Sondre Lerche’s Two-Way Monologue and Damien Rice’s O such magnificent masterpieces.  ½
One Plus One Is One is available
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2004
The Music Box
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