"His time is now!" So screamed the headline of the December 16, 2000 edition of the NME. The words appeared atop a photo of a grinning Damon Gough, who wasn't just smiling over the Flavor Flav-style clock strapped to his neck: his universally acclaimed full-length debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast had snagged the UK Mercury Prize for best album of the year. Upon arrival, Gough was a hyper-prolific songwriter who could pull charmingly ramshackle soft-rock lullabies out of his toque as easily as getting water from a tap, but little did we realize how literal the NME's definition of "now" would prove to be. Rather than rise to the echelons of the songwriters who so clearly inspired him-- John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Drake-- Gough spent the rest of the decade weathering the familiar fate of former next-big-things, watching his critical and commercial stock decline over a series of lukewarmly received releases, and switching labels album to album in an effort to reignite his career.
Of course, Badly Drawn Boy is hardly the first artist to peak on his first album, but as Gough's latest release attests, so few are willing to use that lingering sense of disappointment and wasted potential as the conceptual framework for a trilogy of albums. Recorded during a reported surge of inspiration that carried over from last year's Is There Nothing We Could Do?-- a soundtrack companion to the UK telefilm The Fattest Man in Britain-- the hastily conceived and recorded *It's What I'm Thinking (*to be released over the next year in three parts, Robyn-style) sees Gough reunite with Bewilderbeast co-conspirator Andy Votel and considerably tone down the eager-to-please ostentation that marred 2004's One Plus One Is One and 2006's Born in the U.K. The songs on this first installment, Photographic Snowflakes, are ostensibly about making amends and starting over, but not so much in the context of a stagnant relationship as that of a career at the crossroads: "I'm ready to be in love again," Gough sings optimistically amid the Spectorized sleigh-bell strut of "Too Many Miracles", an address that seems directed less at an old flame than his old fans.
At the outset at least, Photographing Snowflakes carries the promise of rekindled romance: opener "In Safe Hands" bears a spare, spectral quality largely unheard in Gough's work since Bewilderbeast, while the album's most captivating track, "The Order of Things", sees Gough lay out all his doubts and insecurities over a tick-tock drum-machine track, while triggered snare rolls, synth textures and radio frequencies gently amplify the feeling of hermetic, fever-dream psychosis. (At one point, he even casts blame for his creative inertia to the "birds in the sky" who "steal my melodies.") But for all its surface similarities to Gough's definitive debut-- "A Pure Accident" even directly references signature song "Magic in the Air"-- Photographing Snowflakes is ultimately more an echo of Bewilderbeast than an answer to its challenge, mostly because Gough used to be a far more playful and expressive vocalist, whereas his unaffected, plain-spoken performances here serve only to magnify the repetitious quality of his songwriting. Whether you feel Photographing Snowflakes is a true return to form will depend on your reception of its six-minute title track centerpiece, on which Gough drowsily monotones his way through 10 increasingly whimsical verses with no chorus in sight; you'll either find its slow-motion, pedal-steeled sway charmingly wistful or tediously self-satisfied. Then again, when your time is no longer now, what's the point of watching the clock?
