- Critic score
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It's not that Have You Fed the Fish? is vastly inferior to Gough's debut so much as it's an unbalanced and ultimately frustrating album.
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Taken individually, several of the tracks on the disc are the best that Gough has ever done. As a whole, the album just flows a bit inconsistently.
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Alternative PressUnlike most of his contemporaries, singer-songwriter Gough is willing to explore all sorts of styles while allowing himself to be as playful or serious as he wants. [Dec 2002, p.74]
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A treasure trove of musical curios.
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Entertainment WeeklyThe abnormal-for-him buoyancy wears thin, but Gough ultimately outpaces most of his U.K. sensitive-soul peers. [29 Nov 2002, p.106]
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MagnetNowhere near as strong and complete as Bewilderbeast, but its best moments burn just as brightly. [#57, p.81]
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MojoPart of a singular lineage of deceptively amiable and peculiarly British music that reaches back from Supergrass to Madness and Squeeze. [Nov 2002, p.102]
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The music here combines the scrappy, psychedelic folk of Hour of Bewilderbeast with the more melodic and sentimental "About a Boy" soundtrack.
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If he still sounds semi-conscious half the time, so be it. Three albums into his misleading career and Damon Gough, it seems, can still write strange, life-affirming pop music in his sleep.
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That's just the thing with Badly Drawn Boy-- he doesn't care about momentum, or continuity, or a lot of other things that you might quite reasonably care about when you sit down to listen to his records.
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There are ideas galore here, which is always admirable, though you feel he could have taken the 15 tracks, whittled it down to 10, and developed all this stuff to staggering effect.
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Q MagazineFinds Gough at his most stylistically promiscuous to date. [Nov 2002, p.102]
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There is a flow and coherence to these fifteen tracks that make the narrative whole much larger than the sum of its occasionally goofy parts.
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SpinGough sounds like a guy celebrating his birthday in an airport cocktail bar. [Jan 2003, p.99]
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At its worst (on the title track, for example), Have You Fed The Fish? sounds uncomfortably bloated; the superfluous instruments and noises obscure the inherent lightness of Gough's cabaret-influenced songwriting.... But even the worst of Have You Fed The Fish? isn't all that bad.
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UncutArguably, not since early Costello has a British solo artist combined such bare-arsed soulfulness with such corrosively perceptive humour. Quite something. [Album of the Month, Nov 2002, p.112]
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It's the rare guitar geek who acts like strings and horns are where he's always belonged rather than where he hopes he'll fit in.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 13
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Mixed: 3 out of 13
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Negative: 0 out of 13
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Oct 26, 2011
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Aug 28, 2011
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MikePFeb 11, 2007