"DO you think it matters where you were born?" asks the negative voice in Damon Gough's head. "No, not really, it only matters that you can be proud of where you came from," replies the positive counterpoint. "I don't think I know who I am any more," nags the negative again.

The debate continues throughout Badly Drawn Boy's fifth album, in which the Bolton piano man seeks personal and national identity in a study of heritage and history, family and love. In fact it is his sixth album: the negative in him made Gough "just walk away" from 25 rough-and-ready songs recorded with producer Stephen Street last year.

Does he find his identity on his second stab at his big new label debut for EMI? Born In The UK has a split personality, divided between a bittersweet, ever so English answer to Bruce Springsteen's blue-collar heroics on Born In The USA, and the lush, graceful elaboration of Burt Bacharach, taken to florid excess by producer Nick Franglen, one half of playful dance samplers Lemon Jelly.

The cumulative effect is as warm yet woolly as his trademark tea-cosy hat, but maybe this is an acceptance of the complexities of grown-up life. "I feel cold, I feel old," he sings on the outwardly lovely Walk You Home Tonight, before settling for the quiet home life in The Time Of Times, and at the close the old romantic in him can hope only for One Last Dance.

If Damon Gough tends to sentimentality and introspection, Lloyd Cole remains the smart cynic and urbane manwatcher who can skewer all around him while having a dig at himself. "No longer angry, no longer young, no longer driven to distraction, not even by Scarlett Johansson", he says on Woman In A Bar, his sharpest lyric since Perfect Skin. His engine starts but only on Tuesdays, he laments, but his turn of phrase and imagery are still silver tongued, as the skills of the novelist and journalist combine in the 21st century life studies of The Young Idealists and How Wrong Can You Be?

Ex-pat Cole has the pulse of his adopted New England, but as with George Michael's adult albums from overseas, you wish he would stir himself from the mid-tempo more often.

Cole will never go to the precipice of emotional turmoil and self-doubt in the manner of Stephen Jones, who picks at old wounds on his first Babybird album in six years, after a sabbatical spent writing novels and soundtracks. Jones nods here and there to sonic invention - recalling his early days bashing away at electronica in his bedroom - but his party trick remains the heartrending battle between epic structure and fragile state of mind, swinging crazily from sad to happy, from crushed wings to Babybird in full flight, from Divorce Song to Better Than Love.