To all those searching for their next fix of minimal, watered-down singer/songwriter sensitivity, look no further. Ed Harcourt has arrived, and he's got exactly what you need. A recent expulsion from Headmaster DiCrescenzo's School for Emotionally Fragile Male Singer/Songwriters, Ed was retained by the program long enough to learn some by-the-book songwriting techniques, but his insistence on sweeping orchestration led to dismissal before he could complete the most important portions of the curriculum. What Harcourt failed to learn while enrolled was that his brand of orchestral folk-pop needs substance (or a healthy sense of humor) to survive.
Now some of you might be wondering how Ed can be accused of being a hack when brain-dead pop outfits, like, say, Phantom Planet get the go-ahead to dumb down the nation's youth? Well, it all comes down to craftsmanship. Great pop songwriters like Elvis Costello or a young Bowie could have written classic songs about the phone book; they approached their material with a true sense of invention and the desire to craft songs that would not only appeal to the masses, but be creative and infectious enough to smooth-talk their way into the deepest recesses of the public consciousness. Middle-of-the-road acts (Sarah Shannon, Weezer, etc) make up for what they lack in creativity or brains with energy and interesting spins on old genres, and are at least able to wring out songs nuanced enough to warrant a few subsequent listens.
If the best of the best write pop for the ages, and the runners-up write pop for today, then Ed excels at single-listen music. Once you've sampled his array of string swells, backing horns, and amateur piano the first time through, you realize that the depths of these songs could be plumbed with a toothpick. Harcourt writes like a supermodel: pretty but shallow. Not only in the sense of intellectual content (though that's in short supply here), but simply in the fact that Here Be Monsters doesn't have a payoff. Once you strip the polished veneer from the songs with the initial listen, further attempts leave nothing for subsequent discovery. Other bands might get away with this on intensity alone, but Harcourt's straightforward, predictable manner leaves his wan material desperately lacking.
Considering the minimal tone of most of these tracks, Harcourt's vocal is miserably distant and unimpassioned-- he might as well be mumbling in his sleep. He rarely provides the intimacy necessary to sell what he's singing, destroying the most vital aspect of his work. Given the uniform rhythm of almost the entire album and the aimless, meandering sort of chamber-pop background to these tracks, it all comes off as half-hearted. Now, there's nothing wrong with sleepytime music, but only if it has the requisite sense of closeness to the work, which Ed ain't got. There's no one aspect of Here Be Monsters that's faulty in and of itself-- the sparse instrumentation, plodding rhythms, and arms-length vocals combine almost equally to sabotage this solo flight.
For most of its 51 minutes, Here Be Monsters lumbers along at the same mind-numbing pace, and Harcourt is content to offer up the same basic formula again and again. There are slight variations in his staccato piano, or where (but not how) the strings come in, leading to a few first-among-equals tracks as "Like Only Lovers Can" and "Hanging with the Wrong Crowd." There's also a lone standout, for what it's worth-- on "Shanghai," Ed conjures up enough energy to finally let 'er rip on the vocals, and the melody is actually up-tempo. It's the closest this record comes to anything even remotely approximating rock. It's by no means a masterpiece, but in light of the other tracks, it differentiates itself by simply, mercifully, breaking the pace and actually being enjoyable. If only there were a few more like it, or more beneath the surface.
Folk-pop a la Ed Harcourt doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent, or very complicated. Pop legends like the Beach Boys and singer/songwriter greats like Elliott Smith probably won't be the focus of a Psych term paper anytime soon, but they've written songs of enduring value-- the fourth-year curriculum Ed never received. On Here Be Monsters, Harcourt masks the underlying transience of his work with hollow instrumentation, but it's hard to miss that there's nothing at the root.
