Ed Harcourt - Beautiful Lie

Genre pop Publisher Dovecote External Links Ed Harcourt Website

I've always been a sucker for blue music, music with lyrics about death, insanity, losing someone or something you cherish. What can I say? Songs fraught with pain and despair are intrinsically more captivating than songs about puppies and butterflies (though I do love puppies and butterflies).

Ed Harcourt's latest album, Beautiful Lie, overflows with pain, despair, and loss. Thanks to the wonderful instrumentation and Harcourt's aching voice, however, the album strikes a precarious balance between shedding tears and cracking a smile.

Harcourt has been accused of being too talented. He composes, sings, plays a handful of instruments, and to top it off, has a real knack for delving into multiple styles of music on his albums. Harcourt has jokingly described himself as a "collector of weird instruments…a musical whore." His musical-whore approach to making music, though, ensures that each song, each album, will be a surprise. Beautiful Lie is no exception.

The opening track, "Whirlwind in D minor," is a feast, melding country and blues with a pop sensibility. Harcourt singing is bewitching on this track, at times airy as a ghost, and at other times raspy and resigned. On "Visit from the Dead Dog," his voice is bright and gentle as a breeze, matching the bubbly atmosphere created by piano, synthesizers, and drums. "Last Cigarette" sounds like a song off an Iron & Wine album - a lone guitar, vocals that are soothing and painful at the same time, and a violin riff that epitomizes sadness. On "Until Tomorrow Then," Harcourt pays homage to one of his idols - the late, great Jeff Buckley. Listening to this track reminded me of some of the peaceful-yet-painful ballads from Buckley's tour-de-force, "Grace."

As with his other albums, Harcourt continues to show his facility for clothing his dark, forlorn lyrics in alluring instruments and arrangements that beckon you to come along for the ride. Beautiful Lie plays like a collection of short stories, each track unfolding a narrative of natural disasters, apocalyptic endings, and what I like to call "beautiful despair." Listen to the album and you'll understand what I mean by "beautiful despair." Or, better yet, take a look at the album cover, which shows Harcourt's blurry figure underwater, his trusty piano in tow, playing a funereal song. The cover says it all.

Although Beautiful Lie brims with haunting songs, I don't mean to suggest Harcourt is all gloom and doom. Nor is he a caricature of Robert Smith of The Cure or Elliot Smith of…well…Elliot Smith. He has said he wants to "run the gamut of emotions" with his music and, with Beautiful Lie, he succeeds in this endeavor. "[Beautiful Lie] is all gothic storytelling, madness, darkness and despair," Harcourt says. "But it's a record where I bury my ego and look outwards for a change."

And he does look outward, providing a gleam of light amid the darkness. There's an aura of hope on "Revolution In The Heart," where Harcourt's voice soars as he announces to a world stricken with troubles, "there's a revolution in my heart." The track is an anthem for global peace and understanding, akin to "Imagine" by John Lennon. Even on his most somber songs, like the album's closer, "Good Friends Are Hard to Find," he leaves space for a silver lining. He sings of rainy days, fractured relationships, and golden days long gone, but still believes a change in the weather may be around the corner.

Still, I feel there's more depth and substance on the more downbeat songs on the album, an honesty and rawness that is less present on the high energy tracks. Or, maybe I'm just a glutton for a sad song. Either way, I sense Harcourt feels more at home with darkness and despair than with puppies and butterflies (though I'm sure he loves puppies and butterflies almost as much as I do).

All in all, Beautiful Lie shows Harcourt finally coming into his own as an artist. And that's no lie.