Tindersticks have spoken about the process of putting their band back together after breaking it down around 2003, how they needed to let go of the past in order to move forward. It is certainly true that artistically they have continued to create some impossibly beautiful music since then, recording new albums that in no way lessen their overall canon. But I’m not so sure that they’ve divorced themselves from the past that much, at least sonically. There are elements to the Tindersticks sound that remain a constant, not least those aching Stuart A. Staples that forever wander the avenues of morose, hurt and maudlin. Their arrangements may grow ever more lush; the textures and layers evolving over the years to levels of proficiency that border on slick but make no mistake there’s a Tindersticks default setting forever haunting, ghostly and somehow intimidating. There are emotional depths in this bands work that on occasion are so raw that theirs is arguably the purest kind of soul music (just go back in their catalogue and find a version of the soul classic ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ to witness their vast capacity for simmering, slowly escalating emotive feel and then you may find my arguing for the soul in their work a little more credible) but they couldn’t sugar coat these areas of their sound even if they wanted to. So I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to contest that you’re not sure what to expect with a Tindersticks album; nevertheless the first track on ‘The Something Rain’ is a surprise.
In terms of tone there are no new leaps with opener ‘Chocolate’; the band playing an almost ambient, gently moving and atmospheric background to a spoken word story yet the voice isn’t that of Staples but sole writer David Boulter. It’s a supremely well detailed and poetic piece, told with the flair of an acute storyteller sucking you in with neat little snapshots of the characters’ thoughts and circumstance, propelling the narrative smoothly. Boulter’s recital is spoken in a soft dreamy voice that does indeed melt like chocolate over the track; the surprise is that it’s on first impression rather twee and even a little out of place on a Tindersticks record, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Belle & Sebastian. At the risk of giving you a spoiler though, the end of the story throws up a delightful little twist that pulls everything firmly back into this bands’ ballpark and the only real puzzle is that they didn’t save ‘Chocolate’ to close the album. When you first listen to the record and the pounding cinemascope landscape of second track ‘Show Me Everything’ arrives, setting the audio back to a more familiar Tindersticks mode, you’ll find yourself still thinking about the preceding piece and its unexpected ending. Even when you listen again and know where the story in ‘Chocolate’ is heading, it’s told with such style that your listening pleasure in no way diminishes.
Being recorded in little bursts of activity over a 16 month period perhaps lends the album an air of a collection of little Tindersticks snapshots rather than a neatly constructed whole. In the middle of the album is a Staples standout in ‘Slippin’ Shoes’ that summons their ability to perform something warm and soulful that still somehow retains an ever-present melancholy. ‘This Fire Of Autumn’ steps up the tempo but still conjures images and thoughts of dimming late summer days and burning fields; ‘Frozen’ and ‘Medicine’ by contrast are typically cold and tense. So all in all we end up with a relatively short, 9 track album that represents business as usual for this finely maturing collective. You wonder if they may hit a tipping point where the possibilities within this musical avenue start to feel more like a cul-de-sac but for now, each new album reveals work of sufficient substance for them to see no reason not to continue in this vein ad infinitum. To this day it remains the case that a new Tindersticks album always delivers something wholly special to their extending body of work.
Tindersticks – The Something Rain
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