Badly Drawn Boy: The Hour Of Bewilderbeast : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Intimate, low-light guitar riffs; fuzzy lyrics about candles and waterfalls; spindly, spidery melodies -- Badly Drawn Boy plays sensitive white-boy blues for white boys who really oughta know better. The Boy, also known as Manchester's Damon Gough, sounds like Elliott Smith's English cousin, or Nick Drake's almost-upbeat nephew. Like Drake, he's mastered the art of evoking melancholy without slathering on too much sentimentality. Bewilderbeast could be music for bummed-out backpackers: Gough's lyrics are loaded with nature imagery, and during "Stone on the Water," the spinning and twirling acoustic riffs and rambling piano lines are occasionally interrupted by an effect that sounds like a loon on golden pond. Just when the album verges on becoming unbearable folk poesy, Gough makes an aural joke about his own pretensions, ending the blinkingly upbeat "Fall in a River" with the sound of a splash into an icy spring. But even that might not put out these sweet, gently burning songs. (RS 851)

PAT BLASHILL