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**Have You Fed The Fish? - Badly Drawn Boy**
★★★☆☆

Damon Gough has always been pop music's most reluctant protagonist. The man behind Badly Drawn Boy stumbled into mainstream success almost by accident with 2000's "The Hour of Bewilderbeast," a ramshackle masterpiece that somehow cohered into something approaching genius. By 2002, riding high on Mercury Prize glory and the warm reception of his "About A Boy" soundtrack, Gough found himself in the peculiar position of being expected to deliver another album. The result, "Have You Fed The Fish?," feels like the work of an artist simultaneously embracing and recoiling from his newfound status as Britain's premier purveyor of wonky indie-folk.

Where "Bewilderbeast" meandered through its 18 tracks with the casual confidence of a Sunday afternoon stroll, "Fish" arrives with something approaching urgency – though in Gough's universe, urgency still moves at the pace of molasses in winter. The album opens with "Camping Next to Water," a deceptively simple meditation that immediately establishes the record's central tension between intimacy and ambition. Gough's voice, forever caught somewhere between whisper and croon, floats over arrangements that feel both more polished and more restless than his previous work.

The musical palette here is broader than before, incorporating everything from the string-swept melancholy of "You Were Right" to the almost funky shuffle of "All Possibilities." It's still recognizably the sound of a man recording in his shed, but now it's a very expensive shed with better microphones. Producer Tom Rothrock, fresh from his work with Beck and Elliott Smith, brings a clarity to Gough's naturally murky aesthetic without sacrificing its essential woolly charm.

"Born Again" emerges as the album's most immediate triumph, a rare moment where Gough's tendency toward self-deprecation crystallizes into something approaching an anthem. His declaration that he's "born again in your love" carries genuine emotional weight, helped immeasurably by a melody that actually seems designed to stick in your head. Similarly, "Something to Talk About" finds the sweet spot between his experimental impulses and pop sensibilities, building from hushed verses to a chorus that feels genuinely cathartic.

The album's title track, buried deep in the running order, represents both Gough's greatest strength and most maddening weakness. It's a beautiful, meandering piece that seems to exist in its own temporal dimension, where conventional song structure gives way to pure mood. When it works, as it does here, the effect is transportive. When it doesn't, as on the overly precious "40 Days, 40 Nights," it can feel like musical masturbation.

Gough's lyrics remain resolutely oblique, favoring impressionistic sketches over narrative clarity. This approach serves him well on tracks like "The Further I Slide," where his fragmented observations about relationships and self-doubt coalesce into something emotionally coherent if intellectually elusive. Less successful is "Using Our Feet," which mistakes whimsy for profundity in ways that would make even the most devoted Badly Drawn Boy acolyte reach for the skip button.

The production throughout walks a careful line between lo-fi authenticity and studio sophistication. Rothrock deserves credit for resisting the urge to over-polish Gough's rough edges while still creating space for his ideas to breathe. The result is an album that sounds like it could have been recorded anywhere from a bedroom to Abbey Road – which, knowing Gough's contrary nature, was probably exactly the point.

"Have You Fed The Fish?" ultimately feels like a transitional work, caught between the accidental brilliance of Gough's early material and the more deliberate artistry that would define his later career. It's an album that rewards patience and punishes casual listening, demanding the kind of sustained attention that feels increasingly anachronistic in our playlist-driven world.

Two decades on, the album's legacy feels appropriately modest. It didn't spawn any massive hits or redefine indie-folk for a new generation, but it didn't need to. Instead, it stands as a document of an artist learning to navigate success without losing his essential weirdness – a more difficult task than it might appear. For those willing to meet Gough halfway, "Have You Fed The Fish?" offers the same quietly radical pleasures that made Badly Drawn Boy worth following in the first place: the sound of