Band : Badly Drawn Boy
Album title : It's What I'm Thinking
Label : V2
Distributor : V2
Release date : 10/10/2010
Release : CD

Behind this weird monicker (chosen from a character in the show Sam And His Magic Ball) goes the Mercury Prize winning Englishman named Damon Gough, and this is already his 7th full-length release. Before his 2000 debut full-length The Hour Of Bewilderment he'd released the 500-copy 5-track 7-inch vinyl EP1 (issued through the newly found Twisted Nerve Records) in September 1997, which he distributed among family and friends. The 7-inch 4-tracker EP2 (this time pressed to 1,000 copies) came in April 2008. third EP, titled EP3 (hahah!) wasreleasedin November 2008 in both vinyl and CD format, and the first product on XL Recordings. It was followed (after some collaborations with Unkle and Doves, by the March 1999 EP It Came From The Ground. Gough released the last of his EPs (Once Around The Block was actually short enough to be considered a single) in August 1999, on both vinyl and CD.

BDB's debut album (which came with 4 singles) was critically successful, sold over 300,000 copies, and earned Gough his Mercury Prize that same year. After a short break he came back with two albums in 2002: the soundtrack to About A Boy (issued in April) and third album Have You Fed The Fish (November) which saw Gough introduce more electric guitars in his work. This album resulted in a long US tour, where he actually stayed on for quite a while. But eventually he became homesick and returned “home” to record the follow-up album One Plus One Is One (an intimate album, relating to things personally lived through, which was released in June 2004). Commercially somewhat of a flop, Gough decided to change record labels and signed to EMI, who released his first upcoming full-length Born In The U.K. In October 2006. The receipts from the small UK tour following the release were donated to Oxfam. The next BDB album would be even longer in the waiting, and the December 2009 released Is There Nothing We Can Do? Featured music taken from and inspired by the movie The Fattest Man In Britain. Meanwhile he'd apparently also been working on new material, which we've now gotten on our plate. (info above taken & rewritten from the artist's page on Wikipedia)

At first listen through the normal stereo system, the mainly acoustic and soft-voiced meanderings didn't sink in well with me, but then I decided to take a second session with headphones, and cranking up the volume somewhat I found out that underneath the acoustics often comes a nice layered bit of additional complexities (played on traditional keyboards, synths, orchestrated keyboards, soft mixed-in electric guitar, electronic percussion), the nature of which I can only dub “Ambient”. Now, a couple of sessions further, I've come to the conclusion that his man's music really needs to be heard at a reasonably high volume for the listener to get access to all the different layers in the music...and that turns the tables in favour of the man! At any rate, I've decided I nééd more sessions, even after this review is done and delivered. To get a whiff of the man's new album, he's posted 90-second samples of each of the 10 songs on the new album at myspace.com/badlydrawnboy (where you'll also find full-length songs off his 2 previous albums). Come release day, BDB will be on tour, first through the UK, then to Italy in early November, and on the way back home he's also due at Amsterdam's Paradiso (Nov. 18). No dates announced for Belgium as yet!

86/100

Tony.