About a Boy Original Soundtrack

Badly Drawn Boy, the lonely-eyed, ski-hat-wearing pop prince known to his mom as Damon Gough, made a significant splash with his 2000 debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, which won Britain’s Mercury Prize and went on to sell a million copies. A cross between Elliott Smith, the Smiths, and Beck, Gough is a songwriter who’s both exceedingly emotional and wildly creative, making him an ideal talent to provide music for the upcoming film adaptation of High Fidelity author Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy. Across eight new songs and eight tracks worth of incidental music, Gough flits between lush, engaging pop (“Above You, Below Me,” “Silent Sigh”), simple acoustic jaunts (“Walking Out of Stride,” “A Minor Incident”) and gentle, affecting instrumentals (“I Love NYE,” “Wet, Wet, Wet”). There are certainly missteps—“A Peak You Reach” opens with a faux-funk organ line that Gough swiped from “Sanford & Son,” and “S.P.A.T.” sounds like it belongs on the Shaft soundtrack—but fortunately these are minor disruptions, momentarily nudging the album off-course but never threatening to derail it completely.