Badly Drawn Boy Filets the Fish

While there are few things as satisfying as an achingly sincere song, disingenuous manufactured music can leave a bad taste in your mouth for days. In his short career, Britain's Badly Drawn Boy has somehow managed to produce both.

Debuting in 2000 with The Hour of Bewilderbeast--a modern day masterpiece in the vein of such classic sad strummers as Nick Drake and his contemporary, Elliott Smith--BDB has since forsaken his former barebones approach, wandering dangerously close to the land of over-produced adult pop once ruled by Michael Bolton (that no-talent ass-clown). Though such a comparison may not be entirely fair, BDB's latest, Have You Fed the Fish?, is a far cry from Bewilderbeast's rich outpouring of lo-fi troubadourism.

Foretelling of BDB's redrawing from the king of beautiful gloom to an irksome pop artist was his scoring of this past summer's About a Boy soundtrack. While appropriate to Hugh Grant's romantic comedy, it was rather difficult to ingest a BDB record that sounded likeâ_| well, the score for a romantic comedy.

Although his label dismissed the uneven offering as a side project sufficiently different from his forthcoming official second album, Fed the Fish picks up right where he left off on Boy. Laden with "lalala's," superfluous orchestration and unnecessary bursts of guitars, Fed the Fish finds BDB making the common sophomore mistake of using style over substance. In spite of all the bells and whistles (literally) the album comes off as downright bland and ultimately void of substance.

While past BDB work had musical gems waiting to be discovered in repeated listens, repeated listenings to Fed the Fish found several songs to be repeatedly annoying. Although there are some redeeming qualities (namely the "Let's Get It On" beginning to "Further I Slide"), the album's first line alone--"the keys to your heart open the door to the world"--is simply unforgivable. The onslaught of cliche continues on the title track as BDB proclaims that you have "got to rewind to go forward."

Though painfully cheesy, in the case of BDB, these lyrics are sadly becoming as fitting as his wooly hat. If this pop minstrel doesn't recall the dark urgency of his earlier work, he will swiftly find himself sliding into the musical abyss of adult contemporary.