Volume CXXXII, Number 9 November 15, 2002 f

Drawing out talent
TED REINERT
ORIENT STAFF

Badly Drawn Boy announced his presence to the world in 2000, with the release of his debut album The Hour of Bewilderbeast, an epic collage of beautiful pop songs and strange sounds. It didn't exactly make a huge international star out of BDB, a.k.a. Damon Gough, but in his native England the album garnered critical praise and won the coveted Mercury Music Prize, the rare award that correlates to true artistic brilliance.

This year Badly Drawn Boy has ambitiously released two albums. The first was the soundtrack to the film About a Boy, based on Nick Hornby's book and starring Hugh Grant. This month, Have You Fed the Fish?, the proper follow-up to Bewilderbeast, arrived.

Have You Fed the Fish? is a fully-realized gem of an album that grows on me more each time I hear it. As on the soundtrack, BDB continues to expand his sonic palette-while The Hour of Bewilderbeast was largely acoustic, its sequel has electric guitar, strings, and disco beats all over it.

The album is properly playful, beginning with an intercom message on an airplane to look out the window at a cloud that looks "exactly like Badly Drawn Boy." The title track begins with flourishing piano right out of an old horror movie. He also sings about his eiderdown and wrestling with an octopus. The dance-iest song on the album is entitled "Using Our Feet."
Great tunes abound here. "Tickets to What You Need" is a Wild West barroom shuffle. The swaggering "40 Days, 40 Fights" and the concluding "Bedside Story" both rock out. At the heart of the album is "You Were Right," a sweet love song in which BDB pays tribute to the late greats Sinatra, Buckley, Cobain, and Lennon.

He also uses the lyrics of his song to reject Madonna's romantic advances, an act that has garnrered much media attention."You Were Right" is followed by a wonderful string instrumental, "CentrePeace."

Badly Drawn Boy is a brilliant pop singer-songwriter, a modern-day Harry Nilsson. His music gets experimental, but it's more accessible than the music of Radiohead or Björk or even Beck. Have You Fed the Fish? is great fun, and you can even dance to it. What more could you want?