Have You Fed The Fish? : Badly Drawn Boy : Review : Rolling Stone

Damon Gough of Badly Drawn Boy wears a woolly hat, whiskers and bad shades, a costume of underachievement designed to disguise serious songwriting ambitions: He has an anti-theatricality that couldn't be more theatrical. This native of Manchester, England, sings with a bemused conversational tone and yammers during his concerts like a comedian without a punch line, yet his best tunes couldn't be more sweetly sincere. His musicianship seems loose and carefree, but the strings and horns and peculiar subtle bits he adds reveal a love of orchestrated enchantment.

For Have You Fed the Fish?, Gough crafts a two-act play of multifarious indie pop. There is a flow and coherence to these fifteen tracks that make the narrative whole much larger than the sum of its occasionally goofy parts: Fish begins with a flight captain announcing a landing, which leads into an opening evocative of Broadway overtures. Mallet instruments, keyboards and strings suggest an orchestra-pit band that may have heard some rock & roll but clearly isn't a rock band.

Where most pop CDs slide past the obvious hits into mediocrity is where Fish starts sharing its dearest treasures. Fish's first half ends with the poignant sequence of "All Possibilities" (an up-tempo swelling of trumpets and violins), "I Was Wrong" (brief acoustic mood-setter) and "You Were Right," which manages to tie together remembrances of pop-icon passings with dreams of politely turning down Madonna's amorous advances.

The album's imaginary Side Two starts with a dreamy instrumental, "Centre Peace," then leaves the singer's folksy past further behind in favor of R&B grooves, psychedelia, Brit pop and even vaudeville. Throughout this one-Boy musical, the antagonist assures his offstage heroine that career doesn't rule out domestic dedication, that intimate bonds strengthen as worldly conflicts test them. Swimming against the commercial tide, Fish doesn't dramatize reality -- it presents theater as everyday life.

BARRY WALTERS
(RS 909 – November 14, 2002)