Stuart A. Staples - Abandonment and its Songs

At the dawn of the new millennium, the later Tindersticks albums had gradually lost the charm of their early work, bogging down in a syrupy orchestral pop with dangerously soporific undertones. Only here and there did fragments resurface of that dark, absinthe-poisoned sound of theirs, rooted in the tradition of auteur crooning (Walker, Cohen, Ferry, Cave) and far removed from the sickly-sweet guitar jingles that had infested Perfidious Albion during the Britpop era. So, sensing that something had broken in the band's balance (the band behind masterpieces like "I" and "II"), its longtime leader, Stuart Ashton Staples, decided to slip away for a solo interlude. Only to later retrace his steps and reform the band for another long string of albums.

The first move of Staples's new solo chapter was a collection of ten songs, Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04, named after his newly founded label. Keeping him company was a crew of renowned musicians: Huge and Stout from Tiger Lillies, Terry Edwards, Neil Fraser, Thomas Belhom, Yann Tiersen, Gina Foster and David Boulter. The result is an album that, while not adding any decisive new elements to his repertoire, still holds a few notable surprises, in service of a songwriting craft that's never lacking in class.

Compared to the enveloping orchestrations of the Nottingham band, Staples chooses to strip the sound down, distilling it to its essence. No more string arrangements, but bare, minimal settings built around piano, organ, brass and guitar. The "empty spaces" are thus more numerous, allowing the voice to carve out more room for itself, often becoming the album's true leitmotif. Not so, however, in the instrumental opening of "Somerset House", a dreamy piano ballad by Yann Tiersen, seasoned only by Gina Forster's languid vocalizing and a gentle trumpet line. We have to wait for the second track, "Marseilles Sunshine", for the protagonist to step onstage: over the flat calm of a minimalist organ and the velvety tones of the glockenspiel, Staples unleashes his fatalistic baritone, Cohen on his second bottle of whisky, accompanied by a muted guitar. A torch song that doesn't drip with tears but with quiet fury, opening up psychic chasms worthy of Cave.

This neurotic mood, born of long sleepless nights, continues in the vampire bossa nova of "Friday Night" and takes on downright Curtis-esque contours in "Dark Days", a sort of funeral march plucked out on guitar strings and whispered with a shattered heart: "Oh the heartache that finds me the moment I wake…".

Elsewhere, Staples plays the card of a hammy, Ferry-esque dandyism, swaggering between the uptempo of "Say Something Now" – with a circular riff stalked by Terry Edwards's sax in a duel of corrosive feedback – and the neo-soul of "She Don't Have To Be Good To Me", where the brass-and-maracas intro provides the backdrop for an impossible crossing of Motown tones and Smiths-like incantations.

The other notable new development is an opening up to blues-country sounds, duly clouded by opium smoke, as in the sprawling guitar ballad "Shame On You" – essentially Neil Young in a catatonic state amid female choruses – and in the more driving "People Fall Down", a masterclass with a Morricone-style spaghetti-western opening and a spectacular succession of piano breaks, ghostly echoes, bass lines and a saxophone apotheosis.

When inspiration fails him, Staples falls back on craft, letting that sense of repetitiveness resurface which has always been something of his historic limitation. The overall result, however, gives cause for optimism: while the chamber romanticism of Tindersticks remains a perhaps unreachable peak, with this first solo effort Staples proves he's not the bloated night-club entertainer that the band's last few records had left us fearing.

While no official news has yet announced the definitive breakup of Tindersticks, Stuart A. Staples's solo career presses on at full speed: in 2006 he unveiled his second effort, which, given that the previous one was a collection of home recordings, could fairly be considered his true solo debut.

Backed by three more Tindersticks members – Neil Frazer, David Boulter and Terry Edwards – Staples still wields the full force of his vocal intensity, which surely places him among the finest male vocalists of the past fifteen years, across ten tracks centered on themes of abandonment and steeped in the melancholy and romanticism so inherent to that vaguely doomed, "loser" aesthetic that has always defined his mood, even before his sound.

In Leaving Songs you'll find everything you could expect from a collection of songs sung by Staples, whether released under his own name or the band's, or simply lending his voice to someone else's compositions (as happened last year on a splendid track included on Yann Tiersen's "Les Retrouvailles"). Indeed, thanks also to the contribution of the other three (ex?) Tindersticks members, the break from the sound enshrined in the band's finest work is noticeably smaller here than in the compositions – sparer and generally backed by less airy arrangements – found on the previous album.

The album's opening move is brisk and almost carefree, even though the unwavering melancholy of the lyrics seems to belie that light touch: in the opening "Old Friends No.1", the sudden burst of horns and the background harmonies lend it grace and momentum, while Staples' smooth voice — so accustomed to an uncontainable, now fully mastered desolation — takes on, with relative detachment, its resigned and therefore relatively serene narrative of absences and regrets made inevitable by the passage of time. But for a songwriter this profound, and an interpreter capable of stirring the soul, such detachment can only be apparent or feigned, as "The Path" immediately proves: here his warm crooner's intensity once again frames languid, smoky atmospheres and refined arrangements enriched by organ, strongly recalling Tindersticks' own work, from "II" to "Simple Pleasure", with their bittersweet flavour, suspended between nods to the most orchestral side of Cohen and alluring references to French songwriting (Gainsbourg first and foremost).

Yet against the backdrop of a brisk-paced opening, culminating in the wild dialogue between strings and horns on "Which Way The Wind", it is hushed, delicate intimacy that forms the true core of this "Leaving Songs": whether it's a soft sense of surrender taking hold, as on "This Road Is Long" — a sweet, piano-led duet with Maria McKee — or the shadowy, soundtrack-like passages of "Already Gone", whose organ crescendo, built over a simple guitar arpeggio, effortlessly evokes grey, rain-soaked landscapes perfectly suited to themes of nostalgia and loss. As a further counterpoint to the earlier tracks and their richly layered arrangements, there are also two stripped-back, understated country ballads in which Staples' voice barely rises above a whisper: "This Old Town", which with its light piano touches and seductive hints of slide guitar at least retains some instrumental and harmonic structure, and above all the mere two minutes of "Dance With An Old Man", a still, despondent cameo in which Staples delivers a deep, velvety performance, reaching absolute peaks of introspection amid the near-total absence of musical accompaniment, save for a few faint, distant guitar notes.

The emotional high point of the record, however, is the other track that carries on the artist's long-standing love of duets with a female voice. On "That Leaving Feeling" the guest is Lhasa de Sela, with whom Staples crafts a spine-tingling duet whose gorgeous orchestral construction holds its own against the one with Carla Torgerson of Walkabouts featured on Tindersticks' second album — the same interweaving and alternating of voices, the piano, the crystalline melodies, and that melancholy, that sense of irremediable loss that slips in subtly between one line and the next, before the harmonic openings in a luminous crescendo, once again framed by strings and horns, set the stage for an intimate, muted finale. A track like this embodies the stylistic quintessence of Staples, following a thread of continuity that runs through his entire career, regardless even of the formal classification of his work and the musical guises that have changed only marginally over more than a decade of activity.

Leaving Songs certainly adds little to its author's musical history; however, from an artist with such a well-defined identity, one shouldn't expect sudden, unprecedented expressive transformations that would inevitably end up altering his now firmly established character. To appreciate a record like this, then, it's enough to set aside any expectation of innovation and simply surrender one's heart to these nostalgic tales of regret and abandonment, which still find in Staples an interpreter of a grace and sensitivity that are hard to match.

Staples' solo chapter comes to a close (for now) with a side project conceived together with Dave Boulter, Songs For The Young At Heart (2007). An album devoted to the world of children, full of songs, stories and childhood memories. Backing the pair is a whole cast of artists, from Jarvis Cocker, who takes on a sardonic retelling of the adventures of "The Lion And Albert", to Bonnie "Prince" Billy, tackling the delicate ballad "Puff The Magic Dragon", from Stuart Murdoch working on the lullaby "Florence's Sad Song" to Kurt Wagner, backed by strings and a children's choir, on the ballad "Inch Worm".

Between innocence, irony, nostalgia and romance, this soundtrack for the young at heart manages to carry Staples' poetic universe into the enchanted realm of childhood, without losing any of its subtle, melancholy charm.

Starting in 2008, with the comeback album "The Hungry Saw", Stuart A. Staples would instead steadily resume his path as singer and leader of Tindersticks, making the most of some of the ideas that had marked his brief solo detour.

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