Title:About A Boy By: Badly Drawn Boy Released by: Artist Direct Records Released on: April 23, 2002 Rating (out of 10): 8 Date: 05/05/2002
The Curse of the Acoustic Martyr: Easy Listening For Alterna-Boomers
You could think of more grandiose ways to frustrate the rabid fans of your sloppily beautiful debut album than releasing an over-produced movie soundtrack as the follow up, but not many. Then again, Badly Drawn Boy (AKA Damon Gough) has never seemed one for extravagance. 2000’s The Hour of Bewilderbeast chugged along nicely like a singer/songwriter style-collage should. Drippy love ballad here, hip-hop interlude there, and a practically disco guitar riff thrown in for the kids (Korn made them all the rage.) Of course, Badly Drawn Boy’s reticence to sing forced him to underplay the frequent sap of his lyrics and somehow made his clichés sound sincere again. It also nabbed him a slot scoring About A Boy, the film based on the Nick Hornby novel and directed by the blokes who did American Pie that you never heard of because it opens on the same day as Episode II. Lucky for us, rather than turning our hero into a overblown studio technician, the higher production values of About A Boy help Badly Drawn Boy deftly overcome the post-brilliant-debut pressure and land About A Boy somewhere between Poses and XO on the list of successful singer/songwriter big budget leaps. (And for those of you keeping track: Yes, Jon Brion does make an appearance on the album.)
I imagine that singer/songwriters have a more difficult time in the music industry than most. If the best representatives of the last five or so years—Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, the aforementioned Elliott Smith album, and Rufus Wainwright’s debut—give any indication, these folks need to be approximately seventeen times as good as other musicians to make any kind of an impact. Even maligned albums like Pete Yorn’s musicforthemorningafter (which, admittedly, I harbor a certain fondness for) reveal an incredibly, all-encompassing knowledge. Moreover, in order to connect with their audience, I imagine these singer/songwriters downplay their own ability in order to write more intimate, immediate piano or acoustic guitar ballads. For some reason—possibly because they connect with an audience on a more personable level—the stripped down singer/songwriter personas meet with more rabid fandom. Legions of people will argue the greatness of Smith’s Either/Or over XO or, for that matter, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska over Born In the U.S.A.
Rightly so. Far as I can tell, in order to pull off the sort of grandiose music that a major-label signing or soundtrack album calls for, the artist must, by necessity, go full-blown, balls out, ego so inflated that he or she has trouble fitting through doorways. This way, instead of gallantly ignoring the new resources, he or she uses them. A good musician’s songwriting will shine through regardless. Smith’s XO doesn’t for a second renege on the sharp-as-a-tack lyrical prowess of Either/Or—but at the same time, he doesn’t force it. Nor does About A Boy lose any of Damon Gough’s elegant sheepishness. He only reveals himself as the master musician that The Hour of Bewilderbeast, downplaying his talent to gorgeous effect, never indicated he was. On top of that, the range of his musical influences set him apart from most of his contemporaries. Though it has a more straightforward rhythm than most IDM, “S.P.A.T,” with its wonky horn section, wouldn’t sound out of place on Mouse On Mars’ Niun Niggung. The slow fade out on “Delta (Little Boy Blues)” reminds me of Queens of the Stone Age’s “I Think I Lost My Headache.” The album closer, “Donna & Butzon” is nothing more than one-man doo-wop. And, of course, the entire album revels in the type of lush orchestration you’d expect from a film score. Not bad for a guy who cut his teeth on mere acoustic balladry.
Bear in mind, though, that Badly Drawn Boy never called himself a singer/songwriter. He writes songs so bald-faced romantic that they must be a joke. In fact, his lyrics get so over-the-top gushy that they reflect his obvious disdain toward his own pop stardom—he’d much rather craft instrumentals for the same audience than let expectation force him to sing. Yet he does—beautifully, at that. About A Boy, in an attempt to thwart those critics who called The Hour of Bewilderbeast a concept album about the progression and degeneration of a relationship (because nobody ever thought of that before), he treads the exact same lyrical ground as on his last effort. Except, whereas Bewilderbeast contained inexplicably perfect poetry on songs like “Once Around the Block,” About a Boy doesn’t provide us with a single solitary redeeming phrase that we haven’t heard ten thousand times before. Yet, just as inexplicably, on About A Boy it scarcely matters.
The Hour of Bewilderbeast revealed a knack for propulsive, rhythmic songs. At their best, the songs hypnotized. At their worst, they became redundant. But on About A Boy, Gough builds on the same types of hypnotic rhythms and elevates them through the course of each song until they swoosh majestically. The lyrics simply sweetly settle into the musical armchair. Without the lurching drumbeat and recital piano, a song like “Silent Sigh” would wither into a Savage Garden song. With them, though, it swells with ethereal beauty. And that’s just on its own. When preceded by the serene instrumental “I Love N.Y.E.,” “Silent Sigh” gains an even greater magnificence.
It will never be as cool to dig About A Boy as it was to love The Hour of Bewilderbeast. This is easy listening for alterna-boomers. The edge has been resolutely polished as not to injure anyone. But somewhere within the radio-friendly, xylophone-banging tracks, Badly Drawn Boy finds space for artistic experimentation and growth. About A Boy distances Gough from the pretty-boys who mistakenly think that songs about an ex-girlfriend’s hair show incredible depth (yeah, I’m talking to you Dashboard Confessional.) Badly Drawn Boy may slough off his lyrical responsibilities, but his songs reveal a musical depth that a thousand pud-punkers can only hope for. He may lose fans of his sloppily beautiful debut because of the follow-up’s sophistication, but that’s their problem.
