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Badly Drawn BoyOne Plus One Is One XL/Remote Control/Inertia Every year or so I have the great pleasure of going up to the offices of dB Magazine, just as the Greeks went to the top of Mount Olympus, and hear the latest wisdoms from Mr Damon Gough, my own personal God of Music. The man otherwise known as the 'Boy has released four studio albums in five years, each being unpredictable and open for experimentation while retaining both a keen sense of pop melody and an extremely personal aspect. 'One Plus One Is One,' his fourth offering (if you include his soundtrack to 'About A Boy') is his most predictable to date, but in being so he has managed to overcome his only previous fault, his trademark inconsistency. Just about everything on this record is gold. The opening title track is a great guitar melody piece with fantastic lyrics and Easy Love is the perfect follow-up - quaint and acoustic, familiar yet quite different to what the Boy has been doing lately. This album's Born Again comes at track three in the form of the rocker Summertime In Wintertime, which is a truly brilliant pop song - but where the Boy would normally collapse into some self-serving synth moments around now, he instead concentrates and comes up with the delicious violin-laden This Is That New Song, a lyrical feast. Another Devil Dies is perhaps his finest piano song ever, with magnificent crowd noises - I'd be distraught if this never ends up a single. This album is grandiose yet gentle, personal yet enveloping. The Blossoms is instrumental glory (again, an area in which the Boy might have fallen down), built on the interplay between panpipes and a harpsichord, matched by the piano tour de force Stockport; and even Year Of The Rat, the less-than-perfect first single (this album's You Were Right) is still highly listenable. My pick for first single would have been the sure-fire winner Logic Of A Friend, but that's me. Even the short weird pieces, like Fewer Words, work spectacularly. This is his best album to date, with the magic of 'The Year Of Bewilderbeast' but much more consistent. I can't wait for the next one - history suggests it shouldn't take long.  |
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