Drawing Out All Sorts of Things

“Tonight I feel like I’m from L.A., because I’m looking pretty, and I might as well be a movie star,” said English pop eccentric Badly Drawn Boy, launching one of many semi-serious, semi-joking digressions during his Sunday concert at the El Rey Theatre.

Swollen to almost three hours, the show mixed quirky vulnerability and mock arrogance, emphasizing his wry sense of humor but ultimately obscuring his music’s charms.

After his Los Angeles debut in the fall, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter and musician, a.k.a. Damon Gough, returned for the first of two consecutive sold-out nights.

He shook hands with audience members, smoked cigarettes, discoursed extensively on the grind of touring, primped in a tiny mirror, passed around a picture of his baby daughter, actually prodded the crowd into doing the wave and--oh, yeah!--performed songs from his debut album, “The Hour of Bewilderbeast,” along with material from several earlier EPs.

Wearing his trademark knit cap, the scruffy Gough offered highly personal, eclectic tunes that evoked such pop music oddballs as Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Prince and Beck. But his unfocused performance, although bursting with personality, was so poorly paced that it stopped being enchanting and became enervating about two hours in.

Not that the Manchester native, who last year won Britain’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize for best album, proved entirely undeserving of the attention paid by many U.S. critics.

Backed by a quartet, he played much adept, if (naturally) self-indulgent, guitar and some keyboards, displaying a broad musical vocabulary as he blended angular-to-psychedelic rock with bright melodies and bits of soul, folk and jazz.

His songs, though not always memorable, were generally sweetly emotional, from the yearning “Camping Next to Water” to the giddily romantic “Magic in the Air” to the lustful, elastic “Cause a Landslide.”

Even his rambling asides had references. He borrowed from an old Randy Newman bit, proclaiming himself “the new Boss,” as in Bruce Springsteen. Later, he would also call himself the new Bono. Although perhaps telling of Gough’s ambitions, these mischievous comparisons to celebrated mainstream storytellers underscored how flimsy Badly Drawn Boy’s long-winded shtick would be alongside a marathon session by either one.

Then again, despite Gough’s overt pandering, he didn’t somberly hold himself up as the voice of the next generation. Indeed, his folky “This Song” seemed a dry commentary on the over-inflated power of such artists, promising “this song will heat you when you’re cold . . . help you find a place to live . . . send your lover flowers.” Not to mention cure cancer, end rolling blackouts and solve the Middle East’s problems!

So perhaps Gough’s playful ego-tripping was his way of masking not feelings of superiority, but fears of being rubbed raw by his confessional work and the demands of being a pop artist on display, rather than one noodling away in his bedroom.

Indeed, in a less guarded moment, he introduced the decade-old singing-to-yourself-in-the-darkness ballad “Outside There Is a Light.” Reminiscing about writing it in his lonely early 20s, he explained he was “trying to connect with the world. Ten years later, it seems I have.” And this time, the proclamation actually was on target.