Badly Drawn Boy

Have You Fed The Fish?

(BMG)

Cleverness has its place in pop music - just ask Elvis Costello - but the pitfalls are many and varied. And Badly Drawn Boy has taken an almighty tumble with his third outing. BDB (aka Damon Gough) was trumpeted as the saviour of British indie-pop after 2000's Mercury Prize-winning debut The Hour Of Bewilderbeast. Its elaborate, lo-fi folk drew parallels to the fragile beauty of Nick Drake and the acerbic tongue of Beck.

This year, he escaped the difficult-second-album trap with the unusual step of scoring the hit film About A Boy. His irreverent musings dove-tailed perfectly with novelist Nick Hornby's witty observations. Notch up another success for the enigmatic bearded one.

However, on Have You Fed The Fish? he seems to bury the quirks that made those first two outings so joyous. This is a glossy, over-egged pudding with too many unfinished ideas and frustrating turns. It jumps genre virtually track to track (sometimes within the same song), suggesting that he took home too many of Hornby's 1970s cast-offs. Where once he bowed to Harry Nilsson, Donovan or early period Bruce Springsteen, now he doffs his crocheted cap to REO Speedwagon, Leo Sayer, Don McLean and even, crime of crimes, Wings.

Despite the lack of continuity and focus, Have You Fed The Fish? is not a complete loss. BDB's lyrics are still entertaining and there are some wonderful tunes among the overblown production - you just have to search too hard to uncover them.