ED HARCOURT – LUSTRE
Five albums in, Sussex’s bittersweet piano-pop master Ed Harcourt has opened his heart yet again with a particularly accessible set of songs. Whether to his detriment or credit, Harcourt’s voice and melodies bare more than a striking resemblance to that of Chris Martin and Coldplay – though somehow Harcourt avoids the temptation to expand his palate to the stadium-filling vagaries of sound that the aforementioned super-band and their contemporaries feel the need to. His songs have a more intimate, honest appeal – in the title track he explores the various connotations of the word lustre, in all aesthetic and emotional territories. He is an effective lyricist, and has a musical sense of humour too, seen in the tin-can blues of Heart of a Wolf. In a way, Ed Harcourt is the common man’s pop troubadour – who could not relate to the confidently fatalistic Church of No Religion, or the bleary-eyed ballad poem Killed By The Morning Sun? Not all the songs are instantly attention-grabbing; there is perhaps a tendency for the material to edge into the middle of the road a little too often. But Ed Harcourt still does have his heart, and very fine voice, in the right place.
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