Badly Drawn Boy & mo'

Badly Drawn Boy
One Plus One Is One
(Astralwerks/XL)

Even before his bizarre live shows became legendary, Damon Gough (a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy) presented himself as a talent of the most temperamental variety. His debut, 2000's The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, swept from one style to the next, trying orchestral pop here and electronic flourishes there, mostly finding ways to make it all work but always threatening to topple under its own ambition. When the songs didn't take hold (though most did), there was always the daredevil thrill of hearing Gough push the limits. There was also a sense that he didn't really care whether his listeners liked what he was up to, so long as he made himself happy. That undercurrent continued through his next two projects, the soundtrack to About A Boy and Bewilderbeast's proper follow-up, Have You Fed The Fish? The results proved impressive anyway, but with One Plus One Is One, Gough follows his muse into a quiet cubbyhole that's unlikely to admit many others.

"As the past becomes the future, it becomes clearer that it still boils down to love," Gough sings on the album-opening title track. He fills One Plus One Is One with such fuzzy, gentle sentiments, sometimes accompanying them with a flute, sometimes with a children's choir. At times, the album sounds like a lost collaboration between Nick Drake and Jethro Tull, and one that might have best stayed lost.

It's texture without form. Gough knows how to craft a memorable song, but on One Plus One Is One, he sounds determined not to. Instead, he just keeps chugging through interesting sounds until he grows bored with them. "Every day we've got to hold on / 'Cause if we hold on, we can find some new energy," Gough and some kids chirp on "Year Of The Rat." With luck, album number four will make good on their promise. —Keith Phipps

Scissor Sisters
Scissor Sisters
(Universal)

There's some irony in the way the current wave of retro-inclined modern-rock acts has critics praising sounds they once shunned. People who used to choke on Journey and Kenny Loggins have swallowed Andrew W.K. with a smile, and now the New York glam-pop band Scissor Sisters is forcing a secondhand appreciation of Elton John and the Bee Gees. There's some justice to it all: If Scissor Sisters hadn't made itself buzzworthy with elaborate, gender-bending cabaret shows, some might not have accepted a pop ballad as glorious as the group's "Mary," with its watery electric piano and soft, syncopated drums. Melding a "friends forever" message with a sketch of heartbreak, "Mary" captures the sincere tone and ambiguous commitment of classic '70s lite-rock. It's both homage and explanation.

The rest of Scissor Sisters' self-titled debut is more scattershot. Taking a cue from the band members' goofy stage names (Paddy Boom, Babydaddy, Ana Matronic, and so on), a lot of the record is filled with trashy dance-floor-directed throwaways like "Filthy/Gorgeous" and "Music Is The Victim." Even Scissor Sisters' signature song, a cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," is a joke that gets less funny with each telling. The group directly quotes the guitar line from Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger" and the "aah aah aah" harmonies of the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," while using Pink Floyd's lyrics and the song's basic melody. It's an amusing deconstruction, but not the triumphant tribute to Top 40 kitsch that Scissor Sisters intends.

Still, Scissor Sisters hits some impressive heights. The debaucherous, robotic "Tits On The Radio" is a well-directed camp exercise, and the Elton John/Todd Rundgren pastiches "Take Your Mama" and "Better Luck" sound undeniably snappy. The group even equals "Mary" with the concept-defining anthem "Lovers In The Backseat," a slinky toe-tapper that equates pop music with furtive sex. —Noel Murray

Old 97’s
Drag It Up
(New West)

Apart from shedding the vintage eyeglasses, Old 97's hasn't really changed much in its 11 years of existence. Mostly, it's bounced back and forth between two spheres of influence, classic country and classic pop, while growing a little better with each bounce. The 2001 album Satellite Rides and Rhett Miller's solo album The Instigator, both excellent, probably marked the farthest extent of the group's pop ambition, so it's little wonder that the new Drag It Up retrenches in country fundamentals. The catchy choruses remain, but they bounce off a deeper twang than they have of late.

There's a country restlessness at work here, and a country casualness, too. Drag It Up opens with "Won't Be Home," which, with its lines about being "born in the back seat of a Mustang," joins its protagonist to a long tradition of lost souls who find their home only in songs. It's also one of the group's best moments, and it sets a standard higher than most of the record can reach. Drag It Up is a proper full-length, but it occasionally plays like an odds-and-ends collection: Everyone takes a turn at the mic, ballads follow uptempo tracks with little care for pacing, and the title of an old album turns up in a new song. (That's usually a sign that a song has been sitting on the shelf for a while, as any Elvis Costello fan can attest.)

That doesn't make Drag It Up a bad record, particularly in the era of the iPod. Quite a few songs would liven up any Old 97's/alt-country playlist, particularly the heartbroken lament "Blinding Sheets Of Rain" and the high-school kiss-off "Friends Forever," which outgeeks even Weezer by throwing in a boast about the chess club. The only problem is that Old 97's vets aren't used to hunting through the pretty-good stuff to get to the really-good stuff. After a three-year break between albums and a switch to a new label, it seems unwise to return on such a minor note. —Keith Phipps

Viktor Vaughn
VV:2—Venomous Villain
(Insomniac)

MF Doom's genius seems inextricably linked to his thrilling unpredictability. The rapper, producer, supervillain, and icon's deadpan verses zigzag into gloriously unexpected places, powered by potent wit, vivid imagination, an anachronistic vocabulary seemingly stolen from someone rotting away in a nursing home for the criminally insane, and a frame of reference that seems to entail popular culture in its entirety. That unpredictability extends to the way he conducts his career—his choices defy conventional wisdom at every turn. When one persona develops a following, he adopts another, only to abandon it when the fancy strikes.

This year saw the release of what may be Doom's breakthrough album: Madvillainy, a collaboration with kindred spirit and fellow shape-shifter Madlib, was rightly hailed as an instant classic by no less an arbiter of highbrow taste than The New Yorker. Most rappers would use a triumph like Madvillainy as leverage to secure a record deal with a prominent label and a roster full of big-name rappers and producers. Instead, Doom traveled in the opposite direction with VV:2—Venomous Villain, resurrecting his Viktor Vaughn persona and burrowing deeper underground with an album full of obscure producers and little-known guest MCs, released by a tiny independent with only a handful of releases to its credit.

As the lyric booklet for Madvillainy proved, Doom/Vaughn is one of few rappers whose lyrics genuinely qualify as poetry. Throughout VV2, Vaughn flexes his uncanny gift for indelible turns of phrase, stunning lyrical density, warped narratives, and evocative imagery. The entire album is a hip-hop quotable.

Augmented by a climactic guest turn from Kool Keith and stellar production that sounds melodic, glitchy, and futuristic, VV:2's 33 minutes race by in roughly half the time of Vaughn's previous album, Vaudeville Villain. Where that record was a spooky, fantastical, cross-country haunted-train trip, its sequel is a bullet-train ride that's over before passengers can catch their breath. The supervillain moves in mysterious ways, leaving his devoted cult gasping for more, eagerly anticipating the next transformation in what's shaping up to be one of rap's most original and brilliant careers. —Nathan Rabin

Phoenix
Alphabetical
(Astralwerks)

Like Air doing morning sit-ups after a night of loungey repose, the French rock band Phoenix gets its blood moving best when priming the pump of a pop heart. On its 2000 debut, United, the group resurrected the riches of the AOR '70s, hinting toward the elaborate melodies of Steely Dan and the kind of muted guitar arpeggios made into manna by Fleetwood Mac. The mix struck a balance between pose and pleasure, sounding both put-upon and gooey enough to return the crush of Sofia Coppola, who used the band's "Too Young" in Lost In Translation.

On Alphabetical, Phoenix sounds more easygoing, but no less fastidious. "Everything Is Everything" comes gleaming out of the gate with a mix of bright guitar chords, tingling cymbal accents, and lispy vocals that sound at home in the verse as in the chorus. "Run Run Run" makes the more aerobically charged Air link explicit with a simple acoustic-figure tumbled through in waltz-time. Steely Dan allusions show up in "If It's Not With You," which lays doo-wop backing vocals over a warm electric-piano patch.

Tasty bait for those who like their pop glitzy and expensive, Alphabetical is the kind of album that proves perfect when it's playing and hard to recall when it's not. Plentiful highlights—the electronically washed Motown clip of "Holdin' On Together," the Dr. Dre piano and dreamy dub of "Victim Of The Crime"—sound fleeting even though they were likely slaved over. Phoenix's breezy method never spikes into anthemic territory, but its sumptuousness marks the mood of open windows and brains on holiday. —Andy Battaglia


Fans of Hedwig & The Angry Inch can catch a similar cabaret/glam contact high from The Dresden Dolls' eponymous debut on 8 ft. Records. Pianist Amanda Palmer and drummer Brian Viglione trade percussive blows behind Palmer's full-throated show tunes, which are packed with loneliness and decadence. The Dresden Dolls' style initially comes across as excessively shtick-y, but the rangy structures are so imaginative that the album is hard to dismiss. Traces of The Magnetic Fields, Roxy Music, and PJ Harvey reside in the band's melancholy theatricality, but on "Half Jack" and "Coin-Operated Boy," the Dolls sound thrillingly new...

It's equally hard to define Emperor X's Tectonic Membrane/Thin Strip On An Edgeless Platform (Snowglobe), which consists of lo-fi songs made with what seems to be an acoustic guitar and a cheap Casiotone. The boyish voice, tinny beats, and serviceable melodies of one-man band Chad Matheny support quirkily introspective lyrics about pushing 25 and wondering what the future holds. It's a noteworthy debut, at once shabbily personal and surprisingly mature...

The DIY pop is much lusher on Timewellspent's eponymous Parasol debut, which delivers compact doses of psychedelic-tinged lite rock, with Pink Floyd and Steely Dan as clear reference points. Recorded on a budget but given a polished mix by Pernice Brothers' Thom Monahan, the record possesses a small-scale majesty that's intermittently wondrous...

A Pink Floyd element also surfaces on Adem's debut solo album Homesongs (Domino), which mostly forgoes the glitchtronica of the bassist's main band, Fridge, for sparsely adorned bedroom folk reminiscent of Syd Barrett and Badly Drawn Boy. The album's highlight is "Everything You Need," a zippy, hummable campfire song that builds into a dense anthem of independence...

Stoner-rock isn't hard to come by, but it's hard to do well, which makes Gonga's self-titled debut on Tee Pee Records (by way of the Invada label in the band's U.K. home) such a treat. The song structures lurch from speed-punk to sludge, with all the needles pushed to red. Gonga sounds a little like what mud would sound like if it could play scorching electric guitar...

The eight instrumentals that make up Ampline's debut disc The Choir (Tiberius) have more in common with Mission Of Burma than the standard amorphous post-rock. The Cincinnati group plays passages of complex, chiming beauty, but most of its songs begin and end in a compressed rush so intense that it's easy to forget the lack of vocals...

The three Sade sidemen who make up Sweetback could probably have filled their sophomore release Stage [2] (Epic) with sultry instrumental R&B, but instead, the band drafted sympathetic vocalists like psych-soul troubadour Chocolate Genius, whose gruff singing on the sinewy "Circles" marks the album's peak. Exotic neo-diva Aya drives the low-key, shimmering Britpop ballad "Things You'll Never Know" and the bubbly chillout dance track "Round And Round," while on "Circus Waltz" and "Shining Hour," Sweetback does actually eschew voices in favor of its own jazzy mood-setting. —Noel Murray

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