Ed Harcourt:
Back Into The Woods:
CCCLX:
Out now
9/10
Recorded in a matter of hours at Abbey Road's famous Studio Two, Back in
the Woods begins with two of Harcourt's most rewarding songs in a long time.
That's not to say he hasn't been writing any in the past few years - his last
set Lustre was as pure a studio-album as you could get from a man fast gaining
the label 'national treasure'. No, The Cusp and the Wane is just a superbly simple melody, dressed up with literary references
and the highs and lows of genius as befits the likes of Mozart and Blake
(William, not James), while Hey Little Bruiser is a personal reference to his own children with the lines "in no
time, you'll be filling my boots" and the self-effacing "you got the
good bits from your mother/and the bad bits from me".
In fact, picking out
just two songs from this nine-song sliver seems churlish - they're all lovely,
even if variety isn't on offer. Here, like his first EP Maplewood, it's
stripped-back, done in one-take, born of piano and vocal with minimal strings
from wife Gita and Arnuld Lindner and guitar from the man himself on Last Will and Testament. There is perhaps an
acidic autobiographical sidewipe reserved for the closing hymnal The Man That Time Forgot - Harcourt's pretty stories remain an intimate experience for the select
few (it's a large few, but still as select as, say, the not dissimilar Stephen Duffy's
catchment).
Very wonderful.