About a Boy (Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack)

It's a match made in heaven: the lovable, oddly childlike songs of Damon Gough (a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy) and the lovable, oddly childlike characters of Nick Hornby. Gough's soundtrack to About a Boy achieves the rare trick of complementing that movie's moods and themes while standing nicely on its own, thank you. The production polishes some of the eccentricities from BDB's scruffy, lo-fi sound, but that's mostly a good thing. And the melodies are just as gorgeous, and the instrumentation just as lush as his acclaimed debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast. Even doubters will find it hard to resist the upbeat, hooky "Something to Talk About," while "Silent Sigh," with its delicate piano and wistful, sighing vocal, is four and a half minutes of sheer aural pleasure a la Double Fantasy-era Lennon. Unusually for a soundtrack, nothing about this project carries even a whiff of filler. Even the incidental music beguiles, and the more fully realized songs suggest that Gough's brilliance benefits from a bit of restraint.