Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast
(Beggars Banquet)
Okay, okay, I admit that it was less than intelligent for me to buy The Hour Of
Bewilderbeast based solely on a 10 second clip in a Gap commercial, but with other Gap ads
featuring Low and the Red House Painters, I just hoped that they would be of a similar quality... and
the song did sound really nice for those 10 seconds.
The record as a whole, however, doesn't live up to that expectation. When I listen to The Hour Of
Bewilderbeast, I felt as if I am listening to a compilation CD of bands paying homage to their
favorite artists by trying as hard as they can to sound like them. The album goes from sounding like
the Red House Painters to Paul Simon to Elliott
Smith to Bruce Springsteen to Nick Drake to Barry Manilow to the Beatles and on and on, never
finding itself, and never letting me latch onto it.
Each individual song on its own is okay, and they do each have moments of quality in them. However,
because each song seems so formulaically planned to sound exactly like another famous band, they come
across as trite and insincere.
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