'Beyond the End' review: Ed Harcourt's moody, precise piano instrumentals

Known for lines like "got a suitcase and a passport/but all I really want is you," veteran British singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt bought a 1910 Hopkinson Baby Grand and downshifted to piano instrumentals (plus violin and cello) for this album of pristine background music. (It's a break, he has said, from "the sheer barrage of news and vomit being rained down on us on a daily basis.")

An accomplished pianist who studied Debussy, Mozart and Philip Glass, Harcourt opts for mood and minimalism, possibly to score a nonexistent movie about wandering through the forest with a thunderstorm on the way.

The titles are darkly evocative: "Wolves Changes Rivers" (the music suggests a new ballerina's tentative first steps), "There Is Still a Fire" (a sketch for a subdued Christmas carol?), "For My Father" (equally playful and bleak), and finally "Whiskey Held My Sleep to Ransom” (a deeper, more conflicted "Feelings").