About a Boy

Badly Drawn Boy About a Boy (ARTISTdirect) Various Artists Chelsea Walls (Rykodisc) Both Jeff Tweedy (CEO of Wilco) and Badly Drawn Boy (a.k.a. Damon Gough) are alt-rockers who love subverting classic song structures, and they do just that on these auteurist soundtracks. For the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel, Gough nods to Henry Mancini and Devo with a mix of songs and themes balancing obsessive craft with flippant style. Tweedy’s fragile guitar abstractions ground Ethan Hawke’s often-pretentious Chelsea Walls; the CD, with two Wilco outtakes, is Tweedy’s own little film, vague but haunting. B+