Have You Fed The Fish

Placing more emphasis on guitars than on 2000's Mercury Music Prize winning 'The Hour Of Bewilderbeast', 'Have You Fed The Fish?' is unusual in so far as it combines maturity with ingenuity, resulting in an album that boasts few antecedents. Take 'You Were Right' for example (the first single to be released from the album). Perhaps the finest song Damon's yet produced, he attempts to comprehend his new-found lifestyle ("This album was started in January, then I took a break for Oscar, my second child, to arrive in March and then returned to LA") by flipping, unexpectedly, from humour to pathos, lamenting the deaths of Jeff Buckley, Frank Sinatra and Kurt Cobain. 'How', in many ways the album's centrepiece ('How can I give you the answers you need when all I possess is a melody'), is composed of two songs in one; it's the sort of track that buskers will try to emulate and fail, oblivious to the fact that Badly Drawn Boy's a one-off. 'Have You Fed The Fish?', for its part, begins like the soundtrack to a '30s horror film before making its mark in more amorous terrain ('The keys to your heart open the door to the world/You've got to give me two days and, woman, I'll make you a girl'), while the nimble 'Using Our Feet' could easily have slotted straight onto Bowie's 'Young Americans'.