Ed Harcourt
Time of Dust
Release Date: Jan 6, 2014
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock
Record label: Ccclx Music
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Album Review: Time of Dust by Ed Harcourt
Very Good, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 4/5
Sussex singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt has been releasing records for 13 years without ever making that crucial major breakthrough, but this six track mini-album should raise his profile. A step towards a planned whole album of "evil songs", Time of Dust is bleaker than his past work, marrying a dark heart with epic hooks and choruses like a darker Elbow. Ghostly opener Come Into My Dreamland appears to ponder suicide, while the title track is a litany of modern ills over a hypnotic military drumbeat, and the title of The Saddest Orchestra (It Only Plays for You) sums up its mood and epic grandeur.
Based on rating 3.5/5
Since being nominated for the Mercury Award back in 2001, Ed Harcourt has been maturing in the shadows. He’s gradually turned into a stylish modernist cross between Anna Calvi, Nick Cave, Florence Welch and James Blake, it’s only his are-Starsailor-still-cool? warble that jars on this six-track stopgap between albums, and even that has a little Dr John croak to it these days. The rest is brooding, theatrical elegance with a glitchy twist, the urgent ‘We All Went Down With The Ship’ providing some goth-Prodigy relief with its rampant beats, haunted submarine atmospherics and a chorus that could’ve kept the Titanic buoyant.
Based on rating 3
Last year’s Back Into The Woods was one of 2013’s more pleasant surprises, a gloriously warm collection of songs from one of the country’s most under-rated songwriters, recorded in just six hours at Abbey Road Studios. It was Ed Harcourt‘s first album in three years, and he’s obviously going through a bit of a purple patch. Time Of Dust arrives just 11 months after Back Into The Woods, and is, in effect, a mini-album or EP.
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