Mercury landings

Damon Gough, Richard Ashcroft, Coldplay

by Matt Ashare

Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy

On September 12, amid much fanfare, this year's Mercury Music Prize was awarded to Damon Gough for The Hour of the Bewilderbeast (Nerve/XXL), which he recorded under the name Badly Drawn Boy. Gough and friends play the Paradise this Friday. For the Mercury Prize, he was up against stiff competition: former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, who comes to the Paradise next Thursday; the up-and-coming Brit-pop band Coldplay, whose debut CD, Parachutes, will finally see stateside release this Tuesday through NettWerk America; the techno-savvy groups Death in Vegas and Leftfield; and the Delgados, the Doves, Nicholas Maw, Nitin Sawhney, Kathryn Williams, Helicopter Girl, and MJ Cole.

Don't be alarmed if some of those names don't quite ring a bell: despite the number of British invasions that have taken place over the years, the English pop scene has always been something of a provincial beast. And though the country has continued to export commercially viable music to the US and abroad over the past decade -- Radiohead's new Kid A (Capitol) debuted in the #1 spot on the Billboard album-sales chart just a couple weeks ago, for example -- the annual Mercury Prize has, since its inception in 1992, been a poor predictor of success in the US. Indeed, the list of past winners -- Primal Scream, (the London) Suede, M People, Portishead, Pulp, Roni Size & Reprazent, Gomez, and Talvin Singh -- is less remarkable for who it includes than for who it excludes: Radiohead, Blur, Oasis, Bush, the Verve, even the Spice Girls. Although I've heard the Mercury referred to as England's version of the Grammy for best album, there really is no American parallel, certainly not in the conservative, sales-oriented voting that dominates NARAS. Imagine for a moment the Village Voice Pazz & Jop or Rolling Stone critics' poll rating a prime-time awards show and you'd be closer to capturing what the Mercury Prize is all about.

Or just give The Hour of Bewilderbeast a quick listen. It's an oddly lo-fi contender for best album of the year by any standard, written and recorded by a seemingly shy, sensitive soul who counts Bruce Springsteen as one of his main inspirations but whose soft-focus voice, moody delivery, and use of cello, French horn, vibraphone, and other orchestral embellishments brings to mind the gentle melancholy of Nick Drake, a British folk-pop cult hero from the '70s who died young. (Three Drake classics -- 1969's Five Leaves Left, 1970's Bryter Layter, and 1972's Pink Moon -- have just been re-released by Hannibal.) Sure, Springsteen used the same kind of four-track that Gough favors to record Nebraska, but Gough's Beatlesque sense of melody has a lot more in common with the indie pop of Elliott Smith and Guided by Voices' early lo-fi masterpieces (Bee Thousand, for example) than with the Boss. And though Gough does cop one line from Springsteen ("Strap your hands across my engines" in "Everybody's Stalking," one of the disc's more straightforwardly rocking cuts), most of Bewilderbeast sounds as if it had been written by someone more comfortable communing with nature than souping up a slant six. "My feet a mass of blisters/Collecting frost on whiskers" is one of the album's many semi-precious naturalist rhymes -- and they might be harder to swallow if not for Gough's knack for irresistibly bittersweet melodies.

Ashcroft's Alone with Everybody (Virgin) might as well have been titled Bittersweet Symphonies; it more or less picks up where the Verve left off with the 1998 single that gave them their biggest and only real American radio hit. Stately string arrangements set the stage for smooth chamber-pop confections, moody, introspective vocals, and soft-focus guitars. Ashcroft, who's always gravitated toward the role of the oh-so tragic romantic, is now free to exploit his suave Continental croon and his not inconsiderable seductive powers, and he takes full advantage -- "I need to hear the truth from the soul of you/Chase the moments we can share," he coos in "I Get My Beat." Lines like that may work on the French Riviera, but one senses they're a harder sell in the city he sings about from afar in "New York."

Coldplay have already garnered some enticing comparisons to Radiohead, the latest British band to make it big in America. But that would seem to have more to do with way singer Chris Martin's gentle tenor regularly rises into a fragile and quite pretty Thom Yorke falsetto than with any real musical resemblance. Besides, whereas there's always been a bitter edge to Yorke's delivery, Martin is somewhat innocent and, like Gough and Ashcroft, tragic when he sings a line like "If we don't hide now/They're gonna catch us where we sleep" in "Spies," a song that brings to mind the cool echoing guitar expanses of the Church. Now there is a very British-sounding Australian band who once had an semi-hit in the US. But that was well over a decade ago.