The Hour Of Bewilderbeast

Product Information

Christgau, Robert (13 February 2001). "Pazz & Jop Preview". The Village Voice . Retrieved 22 July 2011. Coldplay’s hooks are slight,” went the verdict on those future world conquerors. “These indistinct London lads might as well be Canadian….” Meanwhile, Lost Souls “offers more substance,” while The Hour of Bewilderbeast “…putters here and there across 18 ditties and doodles gracefully arranged, but played with two left feet and recorded to match.” Having put up with anticlimactic antics like Oasis spitting on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in ‘96 and then delivering the bloated Be Here Now the next year, such skepticism on the part of American media was understandable, but in this case there was no need to be so preemptively wary. Badly Drawn Boy The Hour of Bewilderbeast, XL Recordings 2000 When Gough and I first met, he was 27 and I was working at Manchester’s City Life magazine. Badly Drawn Boy was still just a rough sketch. It was 1997, three years before Bewilderbeast, and he rang me up one afternoon out of the blue. “Is that Luke?” a faltering voice said. “My name’s Damon and I’ve started a record label with a friend of mine and we’re putting out my first EP and a mutual friend of ours said you might be able to help me…”

The fourth album from the band was the follow-up to the classic OK Computer and included Everything In Its Right Place, The National Anthem and Idioteque. Manchester-area musician Damon Gough, he who is Badly Drawn Boy, counted Doves and Coldplay as pals, even as the three were put in direct competition throughout 2000 for UK music industry honors like the Mercury Music Prize and the Q Awards (where they all faced off in two different categories). Something of a compromise was made at the Q Awards, as Parachutes took home Best Album and Badly Drawn Boy was deemed the Best New Act, but the Mercury Prize only goes to one winner, and that year it was The Hour of Bewilderbeast . At that ceremony, when Gough strolled up to the stage cigarette-in-hand to accept his trophy, some of his first words were shout-outs to Coldplay and Doves. Hubbard, Michael (26 June 2000). "Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour Of Bewilderbeast". musicOMH . Retrieved 22 July 2011. Polly Jean's fifth album included Good Fortune and This Is Love and won the 2011 Mercury Music Prize.

Credits

From the haunting string and muted brass opening to The Shining, you can tell that The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is no ordinary album, Experimental and occasionally schizophrenic in its song composition, it is charming, beguiling, lo-fi, folk-psychedelic slash indie musings at its best. Robert Dimery; Michael Lydon (23 March 2010). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: Revised and Updated Edition. Universe. ISBN 978-0-7893-2074-2.

Norman Cook's third album under the Fatboy Slim moniker included Weapon Of Choice and Sunset (Bird Of Prey). The Mercury Music Prize-winning album was released in 2000 and was Damon Michael Gough’s debut after a few years of putting out EPs. The album was a commercial success, going platinum in the UK and delivering three top 30 singles.The band's eleventh album saw Robert Smith conclude the "dark trilogy" that had started with Pornography in 1982 and continued with 1989's Disintegration. a b Browne, David (23 October 2000). "The Hour of Bewilderbeast". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on 13 July 2019 . Retrieved 9 February 2015. If you had to mark the timeline when the sorta-genre “post-Britpop” came together, somewhere in the middle of 2000 would be close. Even today he refuses to take it off to show me what’s underneath, “But I’m not Darth Vader or anything…”

But what I like most about Badly Drawn Boy is that he seems to treat normality or ordinariness as the construction it is, not by necessarily challenging it in an open way, but by just being who he is, which is, I suppose, about as authentic as you can get. For my sins, I listened to Elliott Smith’s 2000 LP, Figure 8, to get some perspective on this. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, but it did cement the point in my mind. Smith’s tragedy is his unrequited crush on convention, which you can hear in the song structures and the lyrics. Smith always seems to be buying into an ethos he’s not entirely equipped to live with. Where Gough wins through is in his ability to recognize the fallacy of convention, and to dare to flaunt it, but not by wanton provocation. Stone On The Water is simply beautiful, building from a soft, slightly mournful, acoustic beginning, to a tap-your-feel tune, which if anything ends slightly too soon. Straight on its heels is Another Pearl, with a fuller, more electric sound, and then the strange little music snippet Body Rap. If those musical changes don’t keep you intrigued, nothing will. Cameron, Keith (23 June 2000). "Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of Bewilderbeast". NME. Archived from the original on 11 July 2000 . Retrieved 22 July 2011. Exceptional composition An artist that has never come up on my radar, with an album of songs I don’t recognise. This is why I love the 1001 Album challenge (if you want to call it that). It’s allegedly one of the best albums ever created, and I’m going in clueless but optimistic - I like the album art. Badly Drawn Boy‘s debut album The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is being reissued by XL Recordings in December, in deluxe CD and LP editions.Badly Drawn Boy (Damon Gough) – vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, lead guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drum machine, tambourine, handclaps, whistling, slide guitar, harmonica, Wurlitzer electric piano, lead keyboards, organ solo, drum machine organs, percussion, crash cymbal, vibraphone, xylophone, harp, string arrangement, sound effects a b DiCrescenzo, Brent (30 September 2000). "Badly Drawn Boy: The Hour of Bewilderbeast". Pitchfork . Retrieved 22 July 2011. a b Hochman, Steve (29 September 2000). "Badly Drawn Boy Charms With Understated Folk". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 3 October 2015 . Retrieved 19 October 2015. But, I say, that only really works if you’re Mark E Smith, doesn’t it? Badly Drawn Boy’s music had reached a more mainstream audience… “You’ve got to the crux of it there,” he says. “I’ve always battled against that. I gained an audience from Bewilderbeast, and then after About a Boy, lots of couples starting coming to the gigs.” vocals 1, 2, 4-10, 12-14, 16-18, acoustic guitar 1, 2, 5, 6, 9-18, piano 1, 7, 11-13, 17, string arrangements 1, electric guitar 2, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 17, lead guitar 2, 5, 7, 9, 16, bass guitar 2, 5, 9, 17, slide guitar 2, tambourine 2, 14, organ 3, 17, guitar 4, 8, keyboards 4, 5, 13, 15, drum machine 4, 8, vibraphone 9, xylophone 11, Wurlitzer 12, harp 12, effects 13, harmonica 14, cymbal 17, percussion 17, whistling 18

Six years before, Britpop itself was crystalizing, with Blur’s Parklife and Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers coming out right as Oasis went on their brash run of first singles leading up to Definitely Maybe . As summer arrived in 2000, Doves had just released their debut album, Lost Souls , Travis were promoted to the Pyramid stage at the Glastonbury Festival after a celebrated set on the Other stage the previous year, and both Coldplay and Badly Drawn Boy were about to put out their first full-lengths as well. The moment was propitious for sober, self-reflective guitar slingers. The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is an unrepeatable success story. We know this partially because Gough has never come close to repeating it. No subsequent Badly Drawn Boy release has recaptured its oddball mystique and homespun charm. Each one has fallen short of its impact and acclaim, too — though to be fair, he set a pretty high bar for himself by winning the Mercury Music Prize on his first try. That’s another aspect of the album that feels impossible to recreate: Would such an unpolished, willfully discursive collection with such humble stakes even have a shot at being honored as Britain’s album of the year anymore? Compared to its predecessors in Mercury Prize glory — a sleek and zeitgeisty cross-section of ’90s event albums from the likes of Primal Scream, Suede, Portishead, Pulp, and Roni Size — it’s remarkable that Gough even snagged a nomination, let alone took home the trophy. Tope, Frank (August 2000). "Badly Drawn Boy: The Hour of Bewilderbeast". Q (167). Archived from the original on 5 December 2000 . Retrieved 30 August 2018.

The 1970s

The trio released their debut album, which included The Cedar Room, Here It Comes and Catch The Sun. sound effects 4, 13, co-producer 4, 8, 11, 13, 18, engineer 4, 8, 10, 11, 13, 18, drum programming 8, 18, loops 13, theremin 13 Mr Shady released his third album, which included the mega-hit Stan, featuring Dido on vocals. Remember Dido? That was four years ago—16 years after the album’s release. Since that sunburst intro, I felt compelled to study the whole of Gough’s catalog. In a discography rich with treasures along the lines of Sam Beam/Iron & Wine, I still consider “The Shining” to be his most resplendent (although “In Safe Hands” from It's What I'm Thinking (Part One Photographing Snowflakes) undoes me in equal measure) in part because it sets in motion an unlikely masterpiece.