Astralwerks / Emd
2004
One Plus One Is One
About This Album
After the concise About a Boy soundtrack and the overdone Have You Fed the Fish?, Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy) still seems to be searching for balance on his fourth album, One Plus One Is One. Even the album's name contains conflicting wishes for simplicity and multiplicity, along with suggesting a relationship's theory of mathematics. Most of the songs here revolve around love's simplicities and complexities in settings that range from unadorned to elaborate. One Plus One Is One starts out simple and strong, with the title track, "Easy Love," and the Jethro Tull-esque (but in a good way) "Summertime in Wintertime" cataloging some of the additions and subtractions in Gough's life while sounding like late summer in the English countryside. Songs like these and the lovely "This Is That New Song" may get Badly Drawn Boy fans' hopes up that this is the album they've been waiting for since The Hour of Bewilderbeast. One Plus One Is One does have some of the seemingly effortless grace of Gough's will o' the wisp tour de force, but unlike that album, this set of songs feels more grounded and, like most of his work after About a Boy, the heavy lifting in his music is more apparent.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 and 12)

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