speed of dark

Badly Drawn Boy at the Troubadour, 10/18/2006

So let me be the last music blogger on Earth to say, Yes, I like Born in the U.K., the new album by Badly Drawn Boy--However, I don't like it as much as I liked 2000's Hour of Bewilderbeast or even 2004's One Plus One Is One. I have yet to hear another song that matches Hour of Bewilderbeast's charming and captivating "Once Around the Block," but I have hopes that that song was not the highest point of Damon Gough's career.

"Degrees of Separation" is a really good song, and "Promises" is growing on me as well, but other than that, there is nothing here I can't live without. I didn't feel that way about Bewilderbeast. There are enough songs there that I can't live without that I was happy to buy the CD, and I still feel that way, but since then I've bought only a couple of the songs from each album. Maybe I'm impatient. Maybe I'm too picky. Maybe this is the price to be paid for trying to make an album a year for five years (according to BDB on his MySpace site)--they can't all be masterpieces.

My other reservation about U.K. has to do more with personal taste. I'm just not into the strings and heavy production that BDB sometimes favors and that seem to appear on more songs than usual on this album. Let's take one song per year (2003 and 2005 seem to be missing) and try not to duplicate too many that other bloggers have already posted--except for "Once Around the Block" since I mentioned it.

Once Around the Block from Hour of Bewilderbeast (2000)

Stone on the Water from Hour of Bewilderbeast (2000)

Spitting in the Wind from P*****g in the Wind - EP (2001)

Born Again from Have You Fed the Fish? (2002)

Easy Love from One Plus One Is One (2004)

Promises from Born in the U.K. (2006)


The photos here are from Badly Drawn Boy's October 18 concert at the Troubadour in Hollywood, CA, taken by Ed Wang, whom we met at the Dears concert (see post the Dears at the Troubadour
Click on this link for Ed's concert photo page and more pics from this show.

Badly Drawn Boy Website
To watch cool videos of songs from Born in the U.K., go to MySpace

All songs posted here are available at iTunes. CDs are available at Amazon.