It's beyond easy to compose long, annotated lists of musicians that Ed Harcourt sounds like: a shined-up Tom Waits, a watered down Badly Drawn Boy, a less subtle Elliott Smith, a strained Rufus Wainwright, an overwhelmed M. Ward...but we don't settle for RIYL contextualizing here at Pitchfork.
The confessional male singer/songwriter path is a well-tread trail, first battered down decades ago by some strikingly capable feet, and these days maintained by a small handful of exceptional contemporaries. It's a subgenre that gets reinvented occasionally and rehashed incessantly, but even those with a strong tolerance for breathless singer/songwriter pontificating will find Ed Harcourt's airy croon tiring, derivative, or at worst unnecessary after a few listens. Like Harcourt's Mercury Prize-nominated full- length debut-- 2002's Here Be Monsters-- From Every Sphere isn't quite thick or dynamic enough to withstand such a high level of exposure. With twelve fine-but-predictable songs (fourteen on the US edition) full of unremarkable, yawning melodies, it's not especially difficult to chart the linear path of a Harcourt ballad after hearing only the first thirty seconds, which prompts the inevitable question: why keep listening? Even a bored game of finish-the-lyric poses little challenge here: "We are joined at the hip like " "Siamese twins!"
To be fair, there is redemption embedded within, a few genuinely interesting bits wedged between stacks and stacks of gooey piano ballads. "From Every Sphere" is excessively shimmery, but its dense drone and unrelenting piano are strangely convincing partners; Harcourt ditches his high, lazy caw for some quiet, inaudible cooing, and the whole starlit mess eventually shifts into something hypnotic and strangely compelling. "Watching The Sun Come Up" is a notable pop achievement, wherein Harcourt lets his vocals play a bit Buckley, swinging wildly over a slathered-on skin of electric guitar and piano. "Ghost Writer" is the most self- consciously "experimental" (circa 1995?) track on the record, littered with beats, quick, abstract movements, and Harcourt's deep, devious growl. But the rest of From Every Sphere is straightforward cruising stuff; palatable, but without enough twists and knots to keep anyone fully engaged.
Oddly enough, Harcourt harbors a certain amount of self-awareness about his comparably bland folk-popping and, subsequently, has been making some wild, deliberate leaps away from his benign singer/songwriter pigeonhole. Check this: at an Italian music festival, Harcourt smashed his electric piano into two pieces! And for those not as impressed by gratuitously splintering wood and spewing tangles of string, Harcourt has another trick in his poem-filled backpack: he plays a shitload of instruments. Piano, electric guitar, "squeaky" pump organ, drums, bass, clavinet, bells, percussion, harmonica, slide and acoustic guitar, bass, glockenspiel, korg synths, omnichord, and something called a "fun machine" all earn Harcourt a paragraph of liner notes. They're credits he deserves, as Harcourt's clearly a gifted musician, but his exhaustive I-can-play-it list is also a pretty telling overcompensation. Technical virtuoso has never equaled "interesting."
