One Plus One Is One : Badly Drawn Boy : Review : Rolling Stone

One thing that made Damon Gough of Badly Drawn Boy so likable when he meandered onto the Brit-rock scene four years ago was that he was an oddball who didn't make a point of announcing his eccentricities to the world.

Like a funk-free version of Beck, he's a Seventies-style singer-songwriter for the do-it-yourself era, wrapping his outsider poetry in delicately pretty melodies, softly plunked piano and just the right amount of strings and things. Judging only from the recorded evidence, Gough still doesn't get out of his bedroom enough, but One Plus One Is One is charming; he has stuck to his message that personal warmth can triumph over everyday melancholia. On songs such as "Life Turned Upside Down," "Logic of a Friend" and the tear-jerking "Year of the Rat," Gough writes to the sound of his own conversational murmuring and fills in the blank spots with rumbling timpani, keyboards and a children's choir. Though it's a mid-summer release, One Plus One Is One is cold-weather music -- it's slow, beautiful and ponderously sincere, and sometimes Gough's soft and subtle tunes get lost in their hoodies. But even when Gough rocks out a bit, One Plus One Is One comes on like a welcome memory, suddenly making you smile to yourself after a handful of listens. Badly drawn? Maybe. But finely wrought for sure.