Damon Gough, the ill-sketched lad in question, is such a casual, low-energy sort of fellow it’s easy to mistake him for a mope. Yet in fact the even-tempered confidence of the singer-songwriter’s 2000 debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, was a welcome counterbalance to the confessional vein-leaking of your everyday acoustic open-mike warrior. And his two releases in 2002, Have You Fed the Fish? and the About a Boy sound track, were downright jaunty. There is little spring, it’s true, in Gough’s step on the recent One Plus One Is One (Astralwerks); even when his songs pop blithely along his brogue drags weightily against the beat. His lyrics, however, remain as cautiously optimistic and openhearted as ever–the bright “Four Leaf Clover” (“Go on do what you’ve got to do / You’ve got your dreams I’ve got mine too”) marks a major advance beyond the tradition of the patronizing go-your-own-way-little-girl kiss-off exemplified by Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” At times the fascination with intricacy shared by Gough and longtime collaborator Andy Votel pushes the arrangements to the brink of fussiness: a kiddie chorale drops by for the chorus of “Year of the Rat,” and the many flutes remind us Gough’s not just a folkie–he’s a British folkie. But more often this tuneful folk-jazz suggests what Traffic might have been had they allowed themselves to be disciplined by a sense of pop concision. Brendan Benson opens. Thursday 21, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212, $20. All ages.
