Most people are probably unaware that you can go into a record store with about $20 and leave with an honest to god copy of Ed Harcourt's Greatest Hits. Truth-in-advertising watchdogs must have let it slip under their radar too: while the "greatness" of its contents is certainly up for debate, at least stateside, these songs' status as "hits" is far more cut and dry. Basically, if you can't remember that his 2001 debut, Here Be Monsters, came strapped with a Mercury Prize nomination and extremely generous Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits, and Elliott Smith comparisons, odds are you saw this review and wondered when the host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" started writing his own songs. Then again, the brio of an amateur would almost have to be preferably to the overzealous professionalism of Beautiful Lie, whose frilly "classicist" pop gets all dressed up to go absolutely nowhere.
Obviously, I've got a well-worn copy of Night Falls Over Kortedala that can speak how great things can happen when sumptuous instrumentation meets a firm background in remembering. But where Jens Lekman uses the orchestra pit to sweeten the pot, heighten drama, or serve as counterpoint, Harcourt simply slops syrup over his bland compositions until it's the only thing you're able to taste. Is there really anything you can't get out of "Good Friends Are Hard to Find" or "You Only Call When You're Drunk" just from knowing its title? The unsurprising answer is "no"-- particularly the former, when Harcourt's stone-faced lurch is only interrupted in its final minute, wherein he gets into an ugly shouting match of what's left of a melody.
Meanwhile, "The Last Cigarette", though starting out with an arresting image of a soldier about to face his death, soon bullies the listener into submission with unbearably maudlin clips from Editors' "Smokers Outside the Hospital Room" (which it admittedly predated) and any number of Eel's more lugubrious musings from Electro-Shock Blues. At least that song waits to submerge the listener into its abject misery-- "Rain on the Pretty Ones" starts out with enough canned strings to send Windham Hill into sugar shock before rattling off the kind of lyrics that smack of college freshmen trying to outpity each other in a poetry seminar: "I'm the hunter/ Killed by his dog/ I'm the statue/ Brought down to the land."
Harcourt usually allows himself one cheeky attempt at uptempo levity per record (see also "Shanghai"), and here it's the vaguely political "Scatterbraine" ("how can someone so dumb still be on the run from the law?") which throws every instrument he's able to play into a rank gumbo of mismatched New Orleans jazz. Even the most energetic hooks come in what Nigel Tufnel once called the saddest key ("Whirlwind in D Minor"), although that simply sounds like what might happen if Greg Gillis got his hands on some Ours and Guillemots records.
Speaking of Girl Talk, Feed the Animals just might be the absolute inverse of Beautiful Lie. Both are pretty tough to handle for more than ten minutes at a time, but while Gillis' mashing of joy-buzzers leaves plenty of room for later reentry, Harcourt simply offers a steady IV of teardrop balladeering-- it's arguably the most challenging release of the year if only because Harcourt practically dares you to find a fluffy melody or non-dud lyric to latch onto over the span of its 50-plus minutes. Heck, it hardly even feels like an album so much as Harcourt sinking into the same tarpit graveyard that snatched so many other promising turn-of-the-millennium chamber-pop artists. Tell Damien Rice, Badly Drawn Boy, and Tom McRae we said "hi."
