When I first saw Ed Harcourt at the Bowery Ballroom five years ago, two things struck me about his performance:

1. How blunt and vocal he was about his disgust for the handful of glowy-eyed couples, arms entangled, swaying along to the music as if he were playing sappy love ballads just for them when clearly, Harcourt was up there singing about pain--his pain. Damnit!

2. How much he spits when he sings. In fact, that may be the only concert I've attended where I've actually moved back from the stage to keep from harm's way.

But these things have little to do with his musical performance—or, at least, they didn't that night because the show was fantastic to the effect that I walked out of there a little lighter afoot than I'd walked in. "Irrelevant!" you cry, "you're bringing up things that have nothing to do with this record!" Alright, alright—true enough in the case of the saliva sprinkles, but I think there may be something to that first recollection in terms of how this latest record comes across. So I'll report what I hear, and then you tell me what you think--deal?

Without counting his self-released ep Maplewood, since half of it ended up on his first LP, let's do a quick Harcourt career recap:

Here Be Monsters: In a word: catchy. Adorable, even. Great effort for a debut. Impressive, yet a simplified style of songwriting compared to the next two albums we'll hear out of Harcourt. The heartwarming sweetness of "Apple of My Eye," the floaty, swingset rhythm and personal connect of "Hanging With The Wrong Crowd," the silliness and flawless incorporation of an electric guitar solo in "Shanghai"—these are not Harcourt's best songs, but they're the ones that first drew us in. Initial appeal establishing instant fanbase: check.

From Every Sphere: Arguably his best effort yet. I can remember playing "Sister Renee" for near perfect strangers just to share how beautiful it is. For those of us who love the first album, this one knocks the wind out of us. It's personal, exciting, and effortless to listen to. Magic!

Strangers: With the third album, we can start to feel Harcourt's music morphing into all sorts of different directions. And it's just as good (mostly) and powerful as the last one. The album opens with some hellacious heavenly distortion wavering in and out from stereo right and left and leaving us dizzy and swooning with the promise of the album to come.

Okay, so now we're listening to The Beautiful Lie, and something's not quite right. The songs seem to come and go without making much of an impression. The opening track, "Whirlwind in D Minor," for example, doesn't sound like bad material so much as it sounds like unfinished, apathetically delivered material. While the falsetto singing and novelty music box effects should make this song an enduring, disorienting "whirlwind," we find ourselves, instead, standing amidst a tediously messy room of haphazard effects and dull punches. No threat of this one taking us to Oz…we're still stuck in Kansas.

When I read Vadim Rizov's review of Harcourt's new album in Paste magazine's June issue (before hearing the album), I thought that, "Too many banal truths, not enough beauty" was a bit harsh and maybe only a quick surface-value judgment. After a few listens for myself, however, that review started to make a little sense. I do think Rizov steps out of the realm of accuracy when he speaks of Harcourt's "failed attempts at mimicking Jeff Buckley." Harcourt doesn't fail at mimicking someone else—he has his own unique sound, but he fails at bringing out the full potential of his own songwriting.

The Beautiful Lie takes concentration, and even when the lyrics and music come together during better moments of the album (like in "Visit From the Dead Dog" and "Shadowboxing"), you can't help but feel apathetic about it because of the tired way that Harcourt sings it. After the energy of last couple of Harcourt's albums, it feels like he is starting to lose steam with this one.

Bob Dylan said of a recording session with Daniel Lanois that he felt wasn't quite satisfactory, "You could tap your foot to it, clap your hands or jig your head up and down, but it didn't open the world of the real." And I think that is what makes this record fall short of our expectations.

The material is not bad, in most respects. If someone who had never heard of Ed Harcourt blindly picked up this album and gave it a spin, chances are, they'd think it was alright. But for those of us who have been spoiled with "Watching the Sun Come Up" and "Black Dress," the presentation is comparatively flat—it's lacking magic. By 'magic,' I'm referring to the same thing that Dylan called "the world of the real" and what legendary Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse called "razzle dazzle." It's the difference between 'decent enough' and 'Out Fucking Standing.'

I have all the optimism in the world for Harcourt's next endeavor, but this one didn't just didn't live up.