You need not have your head buried too deeply in your iBook to catch a whiff of bias against Nick Hornby from the independent music press. The balding, perpetually thirtysomething pop novelist has lately been trying his hand at rock commentary (a passion second only to soccer-- er, football), crafting articles for The New York Times and The Believer, editing a popular critical anthology (Da Capo's annual Best Music Writing series), and even publishing an homage to his 31 favorite songs, titled, appropriately enough, 31 Songs.
Like it or not, Hornby is a relevant cultural figure who has used his clout as a novelist to help develop an ancillary career in music journalism. Though his work in the field is certainly passionate, Hornby is undoubtedly a novelist first and a critic second. The backlash, then, is understandable, when he exhausts 2,000 words on sentimental lauding over uneven Philadelphia schlock-rockers Marah, or incessantly pontificates about his bygone youth and its tenuous-at-best connection to music. It seems wherever the man lays his pen, it serves as a clarion call for the press to root against his new favorite band. The task for fans becomes deciding if, in fact, the death knell is warranted.
Witness: Damon Gough. Gough is an artist who has been handily and, some may argue, unfairly smote by Hornby's approbation. After hearing his wonderfully enigmatic debut, 2000's The Hour of Bewilderbeast, Hornby was smitten, and asked the Badly Drawn Boy to score the big-screen adaptation of his About a Boy. Both film and score, however, were met with equal parts acclaim and enmity, leaving Gough's standing in flux.
While many insist the entrapments of commercial success (About a Boy, a contract with ArtistDirect BMG) have led Gough down an ill-fated path toward mainstream banality, I've willingly given him the benefit of the doubt. A gleeful champion of Bewilderbeast, I've been searching for some hard evidence-- any evidence-- with which to refute Gough's intensely biased detractors. I concede that, since his wily debut, the threadbare Briton hasn't crafted anything approaching the idiosyncrasy and charming verve of Bewilderbeast. But while the flaccid one-two punch of About a Boy and Have You Fed the Fish? festered in light of his momentous debut, those lackluster efforts surely weren't so awful as to rule out a potential return to form... were they?
Well, it's beginning to look that way. Back with a new label (Astralwerks), and a shot at a new beginning, One Plus One Is One finds Gough accelerating his concerted drive toward commercial success, and the results only offer more fodder for the fallen auteur's ruthless gadflies. There's nary a strong song here-- not even a retread of "Silent Sigh" or "Something to Talk About", much less another "Once Around the Block" or "Everybody's Stalking". Sadly, Gough has firmly and perhaps inevitably cleared, as ex-PFM writer Jesse Fahnestock put it, the "fenceline between execrable REO Speedwagon pomp-pop and touching, emotive songwriting," and landed on, well, you can guess which side.
The troubling thing about Gough's undoing is that it hasn't come in the form of a mere stasis, but rather a willful regression to a by-the-numbers approach to songwriting, devoid of pretty much any substance. On top of being simplistic, sonically unadventurous, and poorly recorded, these songs aren't the slightest bit catchy, a consequence of Gough attempting to balance his dour, nine-o'clock-shadow persona with FM radio aspirations.
The album's most immediately memorable aspect is its indiscreet prologue and epilogue: a pointless sample of what sounds like shopping carts being jostled in a supermarket, only without the telltale ch-ching of cash registers. Gone are the sultry orch-pop orchestrations that characterized his debut and parts of the spotty Fed the Fish, replaced by a more pared-down palette of maudlin grand piano, close mic'd drums, plenty of indiscriminate strumming, and, for good measure, some new-age flute. Even Gough's trademark demure croon seems oddly self-conscious, doubtless a result of his voice sticking further out than usual from the tepid instrumental mix.
Points of interest are few and far between. With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments. The title track opener features a smattering of glockenspiel, trumpet, and overwrought strings, but the parts fail to coagulate, and the finished orchestration sounds like a bush league Fleetwood Mac. Elsewhere, Gough's lyrics are regrettably schmaltzy, as on "Year of the Rat" he croons (with some help from a completely unironic children's choir), "Everybody needs to know it's the year of the rat/ Everyday we've got to hold on/ 'Cause if we hold on, we could find some new energy." Elsewhere, "Summertime in Wintertime" feebly acknowledges Jethro Tull, juxtaposing a bouncy flute against a generic prog riff. In context, it's something of a tour de force number for Gough, but ultimately a stone better left unturned on an album best left unheard.
