I just came back from seeing Ed Harcourt, who's touring around Europe, and it was pretty good. I'm not a huge fan nor have I actually gotten around to buying his records. But I have heard them and he's written some really good songs especially for the first one. Anyway, he played a good show and what was most surprising was that they actually tore it up on quite a few songs. He was labeled a Tom Waits disciple when his first record came out, which is fair, but there are definitely also an Eels thing going on, when the band play live. Which is totally cool by me. Any time you wanna E it up you should definitely go for it.

It was cool hearing Apple of My Eye and Shanghai, but the coolest songs were the ones, where the band really went to town like they did on their versions of He's Building a Swamp and Undertaker Strut. He was pretty talkative and some of the funnier comments were: "Who wants my spunk?", "So, has anyone here bought Here Be Monsters at all?", and "We went to Superbixen today and you guys have a lot of porn. You're a very liberal people. We applaud that!".

The only bad thing at the show was this complete spazz, who kept doing these weird over-the-top Michael Jackson dance moves, which reached its peak of ludicrousness when he went into chicken-dance overdrive. Dude looked like he needed to get back on the Ritalin. And he was standing in the second row wearing a white shirt so everyone could see him, too.
But other than that the show was cool. So between the Nada Surf show, my recent CD purchases, and this show it's been a pretty good week for music.

I got the Malkmus CD tonight and I've been listening to it, while writing this. So far I must say that I'm very surprised people thought think it's weird and noisy. Water and a Seat is kinda weird, because it has a very syncopated beat, but there aren't any really noisy tracks. I've only listened to it a couple of times, but so far (Do Not Feed The) Oyster and Us stand out as cool tracks. And the strange mind of Malkmus hasn't taken a vacation on this album, either ("I don't really know your taste in ceilings"). So right now I think it's a pretty cool record.