Tindersticks - Waiting For the Moon
(Beggars Banquet)
"My hands round your throat" sings Stuart Staples at the start of the Tindersticks' new album and once again we're in familiar territory. And credit to the band for sticking to its lush and louche guns—ten years after accidentally ending up as a critical darling in its home country and starting to build a cult overseas, the band that found the midpoint between Nick Cave, Neil Diamond, and Lee Hazelwood is still doing just that.
Apparently more than a few fans found the turn towards classic soul and R'n'B a touch disconcerting on the group's previous album, Can Our Love, so this is either a retrenchment or a canny playing to skills or whatever. But Staples and company aren't pretending they're going to fill arenas (though based on the passionate and packed crowd I saw at a show a couple of years back, the noise level could almost be the same) and at this point the world-weary, reflecting pose of their earliest efforts has become lived in all the more thoroughly. The slow lope and gentle echo of "Trying to Find a Home," the careful understated burn of the title track—it's all part of the Tindersticks' worldview, now and always.
The elements are all in place and all fairly unsurprising, but it's all in the near perfect execution—how the strings and horns build up the arrangement on "Say Goodbye to the City" to the near breaking point of tense drama—not once but twice!—even while the band maintains a restrained mood, say. When the band turns and twists the formula it often comes up trumps. "4.48 Psychosis" takes its lyrics from a play and its music from the land of Velvets-into-Mazzy Star gentle surging dronefuzz, and it all works well. Meanwhile, the latest in the string of smoldering duets from the group, "Sometimes It Hurts," features Canadian singer Lhasa de Sala and does a fine job of same. Long may the Tindersticks stake out their corner of things—it's a comfort rather than a challenge, but it's a comfort with spikes nonetheless.
|
