Ed Harcourt - 'Strangers' (EMI)
4/5
By: Toby L
Third-time 'round? A man that once proclaimed to rockfeedback of his woe at personal chart-bound inaptitude and frustration at unsympathetic radio-station playlists is now on Album #3. Ed Harcourt: the UK's most anxiously ambitious troubadour ploughs his trade once more - and, this time, enthrals to novel heights. Again.
After all, his past is hardly a poorly littered one. It began with the understated, four-track homeliness of 'Maplewood' (a mini-LP); self-recorded, dusty and whimsical, it showcased a maudlin/schizo/romantic twenty-something as much indebted to Waits as the spiders under his bed: songs of childlike exuberance and unrestrained fantasy. Then the Mercury-nominated, critical breakthrough full-length, 'Here Be Monsters' - a stoned and longing, eleven tracks of brittle adoration and intoxicating eeriness.
Then 'From Every Sphere'. Though bearing a distinct hallmark of that 'difficult, second album' - specifically in its surprise lack of commercial success - 'FES' is a tragically lost feat, engulfing, questioning and oblique in stature, while containing odd tempers of euphoria (the piano-hammering masterpiece, 'Watching The Sun Come Up', for one).
And now 'Strangers' - the love album; a record openly assigned by Harcourt to that special person in his life. You'd gag if it wasn't so expertly portrayed. In his latest, Harcourt extracts the occasionally flurries of joyful adulation that enlace his back-catalogue and finally makes a full, entire record out of them. It's twelve songs of pissed-up warmth and touchingly human vulnerability. More-so than before, it's Ed Harcourt on a plate - unfiltered and unflinching.
There's less sheer production to wade through, for starters. From the opening feedback-howling strains of a tempestuous, oft exhaustingly upbeat 'The Storm Is Coming' to the following, autobiographical lilt and bounce of 'Born In The 70s', it's immediately evident that this is a more direct assault - free of the gloss that's caked certain prior efforts. Take 'This One's For You' as the clincher - an ode that rolls along with no seeming intent to do an Eddy H clichι and turn into something else. A. Straight. Forward. Love. Song. And beautiful as a result.
Such considered restraint consistently keeps the product in avoidance of the cheese-grater; if only David Gray could take a lesson. Elsewhere, there's the woozy organ/vocal partnering of 'Something To Live For', a solitary acoustic barn sing-along ('The Trapdoor'), the gleeful depression of 'Loneliness' - itself a disgruntled gripe of forlorn endeavour, set to a commendably uplifting, tiresome stomp that makes it one of Harcourt's greatest, subversive anthems yet - and two of his finest compositions thus far: the haunting, underwater stomps of 'The Music Box' and a solely piano-guided 'Open Book' - gripping in its emotive rawness and shattered intensity; the sound of a man dangling his leg off the edge, willing for any outcome.
And thank God he is - few others save for Harcourt pour this much into their work and still remain accessible. There's no scars, drying wounds. Just tales and warnings and declarations of a distinctly embracing, very un-British fervour. On his fourth, Harcourt doesn't prove his placement as merely timely - but as more vital than ever.
Artists in this article: Ed Harcourt
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