Ed Harcourt Embrace[s] The Thrills

The Thrills
‘Let’s Bottle Nostalgia’
(EMI/

Having driven Seattle (with detour to Aberdeen to honour Nirvana’s Kurt-place) to San Diego, it was easy to relate to The Thrills’ debut album, ‘So Much For The City’ - all PAR [Pacific Adult Rockette] sun-kissed songs. It is also - due to spending fair amount of time in Los Angeles by the virtue of the job demand - all so easy to identify with the Irish quartet’s second disc.

This ‘Let’s Bottle Bohemia’ is a denser, darker affair that counterbalances strong melodies with tales of the Hollywood’s failed dreams: fallen idols, faded glamour and unfulfilled potential: ‘Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?’, ‘Faded Beauty Queens’, ‘Found My Rosebud’…

A solid, seductive albeit an album that hardly moves the innovate-o-meter’s marker.

7/8
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Embrace
‘Out of Nothing’
(Independiente)

Embrace - who could have been The Thrills’ label mates but they left the EMI compound - to go independent [with SonyBMG backing]. Shift of label and slight shift of direction for a band that were a creative predecessor to The Thrills’ faux-Americana. The McNamara brothers led band’s fourth album is a good continuation after a prolonged silence.

Alas, Chris Martin’s penned ‘Gravity’ may be the strongest song among the material that appears to be more piano driven than before. Produced by Youth [of Killing Joke], it is an airy offering that yearns for some yester-time. Solid but too polite, it could do with some edge… One wishes Danny would get inebriated and let it hang loose, unleash his darker side!

7/10
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Ed Harcourt
‘Strangers’
(Heavenly)

Ed Harcourt is already on his fourth album - in as many years, methinks - and he’s mastering his craft although masses of music lovers remain unaware of his obvious quality. On ‘Strangers’ Harcourt’s set to write something truly romantic and, in the process, he has succeeded in making his best album yet.

It is not perfect because it still steeped in melancholy with its main influence regularly coming through like a pastiche - that of Jeff Buckley. There are also moments that are reminiscent of Tom Waits, as well as The Cure, ‘Loneliness’ is an epic in the style of ‘Friday I’m in Love’. The opening cut, ‘The Storm is Coming’, sets the upbeat tempo but it soon fizzles out into different shades of grey.

‘The Music Box’ is a vignette on wartime, ‘The Trapdoor’ is so acoustically quiet you’ve got to turn the volume up, ‘Something to Live For’ rides on an undertow of wheezing organ. It may not be perfect but certainly better than 95 per cent of crap that occupies the charts, from the aurally benign Darkness to the ‘lost in time’ Prodigy. Make this man a star - we need a replacement for darling Elton John, for instance.

7.6/10