Track Listing

1. Something In My Eye
2. God Protect Your Soul
3. She Fell Into My Arms
4. Those Crimson Tears
5. Hanging With The Wrong Crowd
6. Apple Of My Eye
7. Beneath The Heart Of Darkness
8. Wind Through The Trees
9. Birds Fly Backwards
10. Shanghai
11. Like Only Lovers Can

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22607 in Music
• Released on: 2001-06-25
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Here Be Monsters is the follow-up to Ed Harcourt's debut mini-album Maplewood and sees the singer/songwriter developing further on the gentle melancholy of his previous efforts with the help of Death In Vegas' in co-production and Gil Norton (Pixies) and Dave Fridmann sharing mixing duties. "God Protect Your Soul" combines an anguished lament ("I need to build a wall around me") with bluesy harmonica and trumpets to create the kind of rambling lyrics and off-kilt melodies a piano-led Elliot Smith might make. "Beneath The Heart of Darkness" starts in a similar fashion but one third in and it slips off into a sound mash of guitars and radio interference, then drifts back again to its gentle lullaby. While "Apple of My Eye" starts promisingly, with its quiet proclamation--"I'm sick of this angst"--it quickly becomes clear that Ed certainly isn't. One for all those who appreciate their music full of understated despair. --Caroline Butler

CD Description
Debut full-length album from East Sussex singer-songwriter.Mellow acoustic guitar and piano-led pop, influenced by folk and blues, especially Tom Waits. Produced by Harcourt withDeath In Vegas's Tim Holmes, it features the single 'Something In My Eye'.

Customer Reviews

A thing of beauty
There's no other way to describe this fragile debut from one of Britain's most promising singer-songwriters... It is, quite simply, a beautiful record...

There's something thoroughly English about Harcourt's style and delivery, something almost parochial - this is not a bad thing, but a pleasure - Harcourt's music is, for the most part, soft, delicate - imagine a more upbeat Nick Drake, sat at the piano rather than with a guitar, and with richer production, and you might start to get somewhere close to what Harcourt sounds like... Supposedly, he wrote literally hundreds of songs sat in his grandmother's house out in the country before he was "discovered", and you can certainly imagine Ed sat at an old creaky piano, staring out at the English countryside...

Harcourt veers in style from the slow melancholy of "Those Crimson Tears" through to upbeat love songs like "She Fell Into My Arms", and even into vaguely "pop" territory with the likes of "Hanging With The Wrong Crowd" or "Shanghai"... He's at his most interesting though when he touches on the slightly experimental production of the likes of "Beneath The Heart Of Darkness", which builds up before literally collapsing in on itself in a wall of feedback and radio crackle... While that may sound a little self-indulgent, it never seems it, instead holding the attention of the listener for all of it's seven minutes...

On many albums, even those that I enjoy, I often find my fingers stretching for the "skip" button on my CD player to find a favourite track - but this is one album that I can happily start playing and listen to in it's entirety... There is not a weak track to be found...

I bought Here Be Monsters on a whim, knowing nothing about it and having never heard any of the music... Now I can safely say that it would be among my top ten albums of all time... All the friends I've played the album to have been equally enamoured... My advice - check it out now...

Lovely!
i bought this album on a whim after reading an interview with him in the paper and now i'm hooked. it's a great "mood" album to put on when you just want to chill out. i'm not sure i could classify it, but if you're into real music with guitars and pianos and feel like hearing someone sing about their good and bad times then i'd recommend you give this a try (after all it's not expensive for a whole cd worth of lovely-ness!)

Awesome
How predictable. An amazon reviewer giving their beloved album five stars out of five. This time however, I believe I am entirely justified in according full marks to this magnificent record. Quite simply, it's perfect. There are too few superlatives to express just how good this is, but I will endeavour to do so, using as many as I possibly can. It really is great.

What's all the fuss about I hear you cry... What indeed. First things first: the songs. Truly imaginative songwriting like I've not heard in years. Like I've not heard since, well, um, never. Forgive my tender years and uninformed ignorance, but is this or is this not infinitely better than the monotonic dross excreted by the king of songwriters, Bob Dylan? Yes, it most certainly is. The variety is something to be marvelled at. There's jaunty pop froth such as She Fell Into My Arms; there's studied melancholy in the shape of Those Crimson Tears and Birds Fly Backwards; and then, quite brilliantly, songs defying definition, refusing to be pigeonholed, like the second track God Protect Your Soul which starts slowly with a forbidding piano roll and mutates into some fantastic rock opera before slinking away in a hazy calm. And all in the space of five minutes. Just how does he do it?

I for one, have no idea, but it's absolute genius. I only hope his next offering is as good. If it's any better, we may just be about to witness the eight modern wonder of the world. In any case, I'd take Hanging With The Wrong Crowd over some dusty pyramids any day of the week.