Tindersticks - Noir pop for orchestra

Tindersticks are almost a textbook case of a great pop band considered “too sophisticated for mass appeal” and thus inexplicably condemned to a low-profile career, when in fact, with at least a handful of their songs, they could easily have topped the radio airwaves and charts of half the world. The mysteries of the music business… What's certain is that they were one of the cornerstone acts of British pop starting from a decade, the Nineties, too often identified solely with grunge and Britpop phenomena. And yet, in that very period, between a Nirvana track and a Stone Roses track, something completely different would occasionally surface on “alternative” radio: the work of a band as expansive as it was obscure, devoted to recasting the refined songwriting of Leonard Cohen in a bleak orchestral key, combined with the sickly atmospheres of Nick Cave and a latent spleen, steeped in a decadent spirit, intoxicated by the fumes of alcohol and tobacco.

Achieving a result of such mournful elegance required an instrumental setup capable of balancing orchestral romanticism, an “indie” spirit and melodic sensibility, as well as a vibrant voice able to revive, with its own distinct personality, the glories of the aforementioned Cohen and the allure of French chansonniers, Brel and Gainsbourg above all.

Tindersticks' music is thus an orchestral pop, dark and poisoned with absinthe, far removed from the jangly guitar music boxes that proliferated in those years across Perfidious Albion. While many of their countrymen chose – some successfully, others less so – the easier downhill path of Beatles–Kinks-style pop, Tindersticks built a tableau of sounds and lyrics of great romantic allure, effectively carving out an utterly distinctive strand within the contemporary British scene.

The Nottingham group has its roots in Asphalt Ribbons, a Nottingham indie band featuring singer Stuart Staples, keyboardist David Boulter and violinist Dickon Hinchcliffe. This trio, having relocated to London, gave birth to Tindersticks in 1992. The other members are guitarist Neil Fraser, bassist Mark Colwill and drummer Al Macaulay. In November 1992, the band released its first single, “Patchwork”, on its own label, Tippy Toe. The following year came “Marbles” and “A Marriage Made in Heaven” (together with Niki Sin of Huggy Bear). After the release of the EP Unwired, featuring a couple of tracks that reveal Staples' predilection for desperate loves (“Rottweilers and Mace”) and dark moods (“Feeling Relatively Good”), the band was signed to the small independent label This Way Up, which would release their official full-length debut.

This record manages the small miracle of bringing all these elements together in a single band and in a stunning debut album, one that revealed Stuart A. Staples' crooner timbre and a group of musicians capable of painting countless shades of orchestral pop across a monumental twenty-one-track, nearly eighty-minute span. Also influenced by the work of producer Lee Hazlewood (Nancy Sinatra), Tindersticks (1993) is one of the most dazzling debuts of the entire Nineties. A meticulous, monumental work that, across nearly eighty minutes of music and 21 tracks, encapsulates all of the band's moods, passions, orchestral genius and melodic talent.

The absolute protagonist, however, is Staples, the leading man of a troupe of entrancing nocturnal cabaret vagabonds straight out of Paris. His unmistakable romantic crooner vocal, in the tradition of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg, is the thread running through a work made all the more captivating by its deeply tormented lyrics, tales of amour fou that plumb the darkest recesses of his mind, also revealing some of his genuine obsessions (for instance, with fluids – see titles like “Blood,” “Jism”, “Nectar”, “Whiskey And Water”, “Raindrops”…). The rest of the band supports his singing with delicate phrasing, somewhere between folk and chamber music, through intense yet understated arrangements, with violin counterpoints and the piano's spectral chimes weaving murky, sensual atmospheres. Despite the elaborate instrumentation on display (horns, string section), their sound always flows organically and seductively, never slipping into background lounge music (a considerable risk for a project of this kind). The various instrumental interjections often arrive unexpectedly, as if to create a sense of unease and anticipation in the listener just as they're about to fall under the hypnotic spell of this sweet sonic flow.

Elusive even to the formal conventions of a pop record, the work's intricate structure goes hand in hand with the extraordinary expressiveness filtered through the existential anguish of the lyrics, perfectly supported by a rare interpretive depth and the band's constant shifts in register, as they alternate between hushed acoustic phrasing, restless dissonances and refined chamber pièces. The album is at once a portrait of crepuscular melancholy and a collection of songs crafted with melodic precision, both in its intimate, minimal passages and in its more frequent surges into an orchestral grandeur that is never cloying or an end in itself, but marked by careful lyricism and restless instrumental flourishes.

Aside from the shy yet sinuous uptempo pulse of the opening “Nectar”, the first stretch of the record offers a dazzling demonstration of Tindersticks' style and their gripping narrative qualities. Alongside the first of the three installments of the “serialized” song “Sweet Sweet Man” (whose recurring refrain “a sweet sweet man like me, I can only bring you the misery” alone sums up Staples' poetics), the album moves with studied nonchalance, almost without emotional interruption, from the velvety claustrophobia of the trumpet and the sudden electric spasms of “Tyed” to two true emblematic songs, “Whiskey & Water” and “City Sickness”, pained hymns to surrendering to a mournful solitude, to a melancholy so deeply rooted in the soul that it seems almost longed for and savored with relish. These are among the most poignant and immediately striking songs on the whole album, in which loneliness and inner unease blend into the inextricable darkness (“the light is just a memory to me now”) of a public and private isolation, whose tension is only partly dissolved by Staples' seemingly unshakeable harmonic composure. Likewise, the juxtaposition of orchestra and surfacing electric distortion powerfully embodies both the suffering and the surprising grace of “Milky Teeth” and the surrender to feeling that emanates from “Jism” (“If she'd have known, she'd have shown me in/ I need to taste her pain for encouragement”), a folk-leaning track that unfolds between the organ's anguished solemnity and repeated orchestral surges, culminating in a heartfelt final cry.

The album, however, doesn't live solely on moments of impassioned outpouring of a tormented sensibility; it also presents the band's more romantic side, fully at ease both in applying melodic components to more restrained games of dissonance (“Paco De Renaldo's Dream”, the spoken word of “Marbles”) and in gathering songs that veer decisively toward oblique folk inflections and refined, intimate chansonnier touches. The record's more intimate aspects then emerge more decisively in its closing section, where – aside from the stinging flamenco of “Her” – subdued, surrendering atmospheres prevail, as if the lights of the smoky club where Staples & co. are playing had dimmed and the noise had given way to a few desolate background sounds, the only backdrop to the tipsy musings on life and love of the splendid “Drunk Tank” and “Raindrops” and the perfect closer “The Not Knowing”.

Although less immediate than the abrasive orchestral ballads that open the record, the more delicate, intimate songs showcase Staples' melodic talent and the band's compositional quality, as they enrich bare-boned song structures with a deeply personal touch, simply through string arrangements and the elegant, antique sound of Boulter's organ. Staples, for his part, plunges into genuine chasms of sadness; take for example the aching piece “Jism”, made melancholy by its opening organ/keyboard melody and its keening violin: “Give up the drugs/ Take the power I offer/ Oh the deeper I go/ The further I fall/ The more I know/ The tighter your grip around me/ So easily broken”. If slo-core exists, this could easily be rechristened “sad-core”.

Tindersticks was named “Album of the Year” by Melody Maker and earned glowing reviews from critics. Only critics, though, because someone decided the masses had to be kept away from such a treasure.

After such a debut, repeating the feat becomes almost impossible. Tindersticks II (preceded by the singles “Kathleen” and “No More Affairs”) gives it a shot anyway. Boldly, but perhaps also with a touch of self-indulgence. For the occasion the band enlists a few notable guest spots, such as Terry Edwards of Gallon Drunk and Carla Torgerson of The Walkabouts. The grandeur remains, but isn't always matched by equally inspired songwriting. Piano and acoustic guitar dominate, with occasional touches of violin, drums and trumpet.

Staples' songs remain obsessive and anguished (“El Diablo En El Ojo”, “Mistakes”), at times drowning their despair in black humor (“My Sister”), but there's also a greater attention to extended instrumental passages and a few spine-tingling duets, like “Travelling Light”, which serves as something of the album's emotional tour de force: a bitter tale of separation and recrimination, sung together with Torgerson. The band's talent also shines in its more restrained, intimate moments, such as “Tiny Tears”, with its sad, solitary organ, the instrumentals “Vertrauen II, III”, and the melancholy “No More Affairs”, the epitome of every romantic regret.

At other times, however, (“A Night In”, “Cherry Blossoms”) the band loses itself in syrupier, hazier ballads.

In 1996, Tindersticks embarked on their fruitful collaboration with French director Claire Denis, scoring the film Nénette Et Boni, a largely instrumental album steeped in deeply nocturnal pop-jazz, once again marked by elegant string arrangements.

With the following album, Curtains (1997), the Nottingham sextet instead veered toward a more grandiose avant-pop, treading dangerously close to pretentiousness. There's no shortage of experimental ambition here (an avant-garde exploration of minimalist jazz-pop, cacophonous strings), but compared to the past there seems to be less continuity, with the spectre of boredom looming menacingly. The special guests this time are singer and actress Ann Magnuson, who appears on the duet "Buried Bones", actress Isabella Rossellini, who tries her hand at singing on "Marriage Made in Heaven", and the two "salsa" trumpeters Jesus Alemany and Joe de Jesus. Staples, however, remains the undisputed star of the show, his melodramatic baritone and lyrics steeped in existential pessimism at times brushing up against the desolate territories of Scott Walker and Nick Cave ("Another Night In Rented Rooms", "Let's Pretend", "Ballad Of Tindersticks").

Perhaps the word that best sums up this record, though, is "mannered" — albeit always with great class.

The official onset of the band's "crisis" was sealed by the following album, Simple Pleasure (1999). The Tindersticks sound, once vibrant and majestic, grew increasingly predictable and anaemic. While the uptempo opener "Can We Start Again" seems to hint at an "optimistic" turn in their sound, the tracks that follow confirm Staples in his role as the romantic bard gripped by lovesick yearning, from "Before You Close Your Eyes" to "I Know That Loving", all the way to the closing "CF GF", all steeped in soul and gospel flavours.

But perhaps the record's real masterstroke is "If You're Looking For A Way Out", which transforms the Odyssey's 80s soul hit into a ballad of extraordinary tenderness. It's a tenderness that pervades much of the album, though it too often degenerates into cloying preciousness. In doing so, the record loses much of the initial appeal of the Tindersticks sound — sophisticated and rarefied, yes, but always passionate and able to catch the listener off guard at just the right moment.

Simple Pleasure was essentially disowned by the band itself. "It was too cerebral a record," Staples explained in an interview. "Our music had become overly abstract and convoluted, lacking any soul."

The following album, Can Our Love, however, proved wrong those who thought the band was now in decline, trapped in the very clichés they themselves had helped create. Having reined in their wordiness (just 8 tracks on the album), Tindersticks rose again, drawing above all on their flair for Motown-rooted soul. An elegant, dark "Northern Soul", delivered through enveloping ballads redolent of smoke, liquor and the nightclubs of the Old Continent. The record alternates slow, aching ballads, like the opener "Dying Slowly", with sweeping soul excursions, like "People Keep Coming Around", driven by a rhythmic bassline with Staples' baritone sobbing despondently and the horns breaking loose in the finale, or "Don't Ever Get Tired", in which the singer almost seems to channel the most despairing Otis Redding. At other times their romanticism takes flight on simple violin phrases ("No Man In The World"), on hushed guitar arpeggios ("Don't Ever Get Tired"), on the solemn notes of a Sixties organ à la Procol Harum ("Sweet Release, Chili Time"), or on a sigh of distant horns ("Can Our Love"). Overall, the record shows encouraging signs of recovery and attests to the band's desire to put themselves back on the line, broadening their sonic range.

This happy period was also confirmed by the soundtrack for another Denis film, Trouble Every Day. A thriller that was the most "scandalous" event of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Described as "a genetically modified horror movie, blood-red in colour" for its concentrated dose of sex, violence and cannibalism, the film outraged or enthralled depending on one's taste. But beyond the performances of leads Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle, what won everyone over was precisely the soundtrack. A work steeped in melancholy and decadence, in keeping with the Nottingham sextet's most "nocturnal" output.

The partnership with Denis proved to be a happy one indeed, as confirmed by David Boulter, the band's keyboardist: "The great thing about this experience with Claire is that she gave us complete freedom. She drew inspiration from our music while shooting the film almost more than we drew inspiration from her images while composing the soundtrack." The singer, Stuart Staples, went even further: "I think a deep bond has formed with Claire by now. We want to work together again, because we have a lot in common, both in our outlook on things and in our approach to work."

Amid the notes of Tindersticks, the film's violence dissolves into a subdued requiem. It's a slow descent into hell, beginning with the notes of "Opening Titles", the dominant theme, gradually reworked through variations now ethereal, now urgent, with Staples' baritone returning to intone a mournful melody, halfway between the most depressed Cave and the noirest Cohen. The spirit of the record wavers between moments of stillness and flashes of excruciating tension. A sinister ticking disturbs the calm of "Maid Theme", while the menacing trumpet of "Room 321" helps weigh down an atmosphere that grows ever more thrilling with the bell tolls of "Notre Dame" and the dark basslines of "Killing Theme". "Closing Titles" closes the record by foregrounding strings and rhythm section, with Staples' monotone baritone returning to intone the sorrowful melody of "Trouble Every Day". The tracks unfold slowly and majestically. The only drawback, perhaps, is a certain repetitiveness, which nonetheless does not undermine the record's emotional impact.

With Trouble Every Day, indeed, Tindersticks seem to have returned to top form. "It's as if our music came back to life," Staples explained. "A sense of spontaneity returned that seemed lost, but which perhaps had never truly disappeared." Claire Denis's images, in short, seem to have revived the most thrilling side of their sound. "We're working on a lot of ideas. Everyone in the band is happy, and we feel ready to take on new challenges."

It's a shame, then, that the following studio album, Waiting For The Moon (2003), largely falls short of expectations. Across its ten tracks, yawns tend to win out over the initial enthusiasm. The record's truly memorable moments are those in which the miracle occurs of fusing Leonard Cohen's dark songbook with the orchestral flair of Burt Bacharach. "Until The Morning Comes", for instance, is a remarkable exercise in melodic pop, wrapped in seductive, melancholy sonorities, with Staples' voice echoing the Canadian bard's warm baritone. "Say Goodbye To The City" does even better, the record's emotional peak, interweaving hazy atmospheres with surges of rhythm, an aching violin à la Dirty Three, and powerful gusts of trumpet in the finale. "Sweet Memory", however, already sinks into a swooning, treacly café-decadent mood. Fearing they might lull the listener to sleep, Tindersticks then spring the record's surprise: the psychedelic "4.48 Psychosis" (the only track not written by the band, but by Sarah Kane), which decidedly ups the tempo, bringing in high-tension electric guitars and crisp, incisive drumming.

But after this jolt, the album once again sinks back into torpor. The music-box title track, accompanied by Staples' whispered vocal, is only redeemed by the faint moans of violin in the background. "Trying To Find A Home" follows the same path, but leans further into the band's blues/soul side, echoing its "white" derivations (Beatles, Rolling Stones) more than its African-American origins. It's perhaps the album's last happy moment, which ends up sliding into a spineless soft-pop. The duet "Sometimes It Hurts" (with the elegant vocalist Lhasa De Sela) caresses without ever scratching, leaving behind a somewhat overly saccharine aftertaste. "Oblivion" is another "orchestral-romantic" Tindersticks exercise, but with no pathos left in it. The "playful" digression of "Just A Dog" isn't jarring so much as irritating. And the closing "Running Wild" finds Staples playing a Bryan Ferry anaesthetised with massive doses of morphine. A shame, because even on a minor record like this one, there's no shortage of signs of a compositional talent well above average.

Perhaps sensing that something in the band's balance had broken, Stuart A. Staples decided to focus on a solo career steeped in the tradition of the singer-songwriter crooner, while always leaving open the possibility of a Tindersticks reunion.

It was precisely Staples' second album, "Leaving Songs", that provided the occasion for his first reconciliation with three of his former bandmates — Neil Fraser, David Boulter and Terry Edwards — soon followed by a spontaneous full-band reunion for a live performance of Tindersticks II at the Barbican Hall in September 2006. By that point, the band's long silence and its members' parallel pursuits had already sufficiently replenished their respective wells of inspiration, making it entirely natural to start making music together again. Having overcome their "seventh-album crisis", Tindersticks got back to work together, spending all of 2007 writing a new record, in a lineup that differed from the original only in the addition of Thomas Belhom on drums.

The result, The Hungry Saw (2008), presents itself in the most classic Tindersticks style, starting with the pierced-heart iconography on the cover and the three and a half minutes of the instrumental "Intro", where notes dripped slowly from the piano immediately reacclimatize listeners to the band's smoky atmospheres. The heartrending ballad "Yesterday Tomorrows" seems to present itself as a new beginning that brings the troubles and hopes of days past back into the present. A nostalgic spleen invades, beneath the surface, songs built around Staples' lyricism and hushed, nocturnal orchestral arrangements centred on piano and strings, forming ideal decadent soundtracks ("Feel The Sun", the instrumentals "E Type" and "The Organist Entertains"), now more uptempo and seemingly sunnier ("The Flicker Of A Little Girl" and the title-track).

It's precisely the arrangements, at times more stripped-down than in the past, that are the true jewel of this work: having moved past the orchestral excesses, by now somewhat stale, of their last few records, Tindersticks in fact show a rediscovered vein with airy, inspired tracks, often introducing almost imperceptible novelties into their sound. The effect is evident on "Boobar", a lyrical and passionate track, light years away from "formula", and even more so on "All The Love", where an elegant arrangement sets off Staples' deep, intense voice, pairing it with the angelic one of a mysterious Suzanne.

But it's across the whole of the album, in general, that Tindersticks' poetics seem to have recovered an inspiration capable of stirring the soul, with that disenchantment that lets one view the heart's inextricable torments almost with detachment. And that's still what Tindersticks are aiming for, as exemplified by the lyrics of the title track (“First carve is the skin/ the second is the muscle/ there’s crack of the bone/ and here’s at your heart”), and by the many excellent ballads that, through meticulously crafted, effective melodies, confirm Staples as the perfect interpreter of a romantic sensibility with a dark allure.

His vocal depth, combined with the rediscovered melodic clarity that animates little gems like "Yesterday Tomorrows", "The Other Side Of The World" and "Mother Dear", won't manage to match the appeal of the band's first two, unforgettable albums, yet The Hungry Saw can be hailed as the most striking of Tindersticks' recent records.

The unexpected reunion finds a prompt follow-up, in under two years, with Falling Down A Mountain, which, unlike its inspired predecessor, instead seems to represent a kind of return to the fold, both in terms of writing and harmonic scope.

Recorded between France and Brussels, Falling Down A Mountain still surveys, with nostalgic taste, all of Tindersticks' classic atmospheres, yet it seems that in shaping the record the band's attention focused more on the sonic frame of the tracks than on their essential elements.

One gets the impression that the renewed desire to work together, after an album written and played on a wave of emotion, led Tindersticks to focus too much on sounds while neglecting the songwriting: indeed, although the extended title track tries to echo, in bold jazzy shades, the murky atmospheres of their debut years, and a track like "Black Smoke" breaks away quite noticeably from their previous output, even the more decisive and successful melodic ideas — in the delicate "Keep You Beautiful" or the desolate piano ballad "Factory Girls" — remain mostly confined to mere hints, dressed in the usual catalogue of orchestral arrangements laden with pathos and melancholy.

Even Stuart Staples' voice, an element that has always defined Tindersticks' sound and which has grown richer in nuance and intensity over time, is now caught up in a pale process of recovering and reinventing the past, one that not even the ritual duet ("Peanuts", featuring Staples alongside the resurgent Canadian singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O'Hara) manages to lift.

In light of Falling Down A Mountain, one might say Tindersticks have once again taken the colourless direction evident in the records preceding their temporary split, although even this record isn't without its worthwhile moments, owed mostly to the seasoned experience with which the band echoes the ideas and expressive nuances that made it famous.

Canadian label Constellation welcomes into its lunar realm The Something Rain (2012), the third record since the 2008 reunion, while 2011 saw the release of a collection gathering all the soundtracks with which Tindersticks had, over the years, enriched the cinema of French director Claire Denis, Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009.

This time the oscillation between night and day gives way to an intense emotional timelessness, in which the temptation to drift is, appearances aside, equally distant from the trivial notion of "background music". As has become a renewed band habit, the album opens with the spoken intro "Chocolate", which, over a little more than nine enveloping minutes, revisits "My Sister", a track from Tindersticks II, the band's 1995 post-debut. Introduced by a soul chorus, Staples' baritone enters with its usual endless, bewitching grace on "Show Me Everything", a track that, from its stripped-down instrumental incipit, gradually opens up to other instruments, following the shifting Staples-esque mood, ever more sweetly insistent in its declaiming of "show me everything". A song of love and shadow, a tortured tension between eros and thanatos, is "Medicine", a yearning embroidered by fragile violin that brings to mind the image of a Cohen more directly caught up in the throes of love. "This Fire of Autumn", electronic folk, moves like a moderately syncopated dance of dying leaves, in a pulsing, elegantly tense dialectic, and the pull of electronics returns on "Frozen", a sonic vortex à-la Portishead, a dark hive in which to lose oneself following the trace of the voice of a Staples wonderfully carried away.

There's also room for ballads: from the desolate, whispered solipsism of "A Night to Still", to the sensual languor of "Come Inside", a kind of more pacified "My Oblivion", set in an orchestral pop in which the crooner once again deploys all his weapons of seduction, rendering any attempt at resistance futile. "Slippin' Shoes", with its Mitteleuropean rumba structure, momentarily interrupts the shadowy quality that, as the band's poetic DNA, pervades the whole album, with a sunny, intriguing horn section. The closer is an instrumental, a delicate, cinematic siren song of the air à-la Dirty Three ("Goodbye Joe").

The album, recorded between May 2010 and August 2011, springs from a special impulse, as noted in the liner notes written by Stuart Staples himself: "⟦Q1⟧". Loss, bewilderment, love and death once again don one of the most dignified and elegant garbs in the history of auteur pop of the last twenty years, and the concept of existence catches its breath, to reveal itself in all its allure and its unease.

In 2013 the band released Across Six Leap Years, which recovers a handful of tracks that were never really lost, recorded at Abbey Road's Studio 2.

Those who loved "Lucky Dog Recordings", Staples' first solo album, released in 2005, will appreciate the slightly more fragile elegance lent to the opening ballad, "Friday Night", a dizzying slow-motion rumba, perfect for soundtracking beauty and damnation alike, before moving on to the inspired languor of "Marseilles Sunshine", stripped of the panicked fear of the original recording to make way for the grace of strings. Going back as far as 2001, we arrive at "Dying Slowly", a crossroads of great references: from the songwriting of a more luminous Cohen to the affected voluptuousness of a certain Mr. Ferry, with the addition of a more prominent piano intent on smoothing out any rough edges.

Towards the end, a brief parenthesis on the night and its demons, with a double citation from the self-titled second album of 1995: “Sleepy Song”, sung in a less subdued tone, as if having learned to move more deftly through the darkness, and “A Night In”, less flashy than an untouchable and eternally beautiful “No More Affairs” – an obvious choice – but an equally intense psychodrama, bordering on a visionary, sugar-coated poetics à-la Lee Hazlewood, who, as producer of the first album in 1993, left an inimitable mark on the band.

To close, “What Are You Fighting For?”, the precious limited-edition 7″ from 2008, comes back to life on a shifting carpet of leaves that, from the autumn of the original, turns colour into the sweetness of an enveloping spring. On the threshold of disenchantment, in a time when Love becomes a vacuous, glossy obsession, Stuart A. Staples and his fellow travellers in unease bring us back to the mirage of a whispered density, a magnetic attraction, a dizzying complexity, in the half-light of an eternal, unrelinquishable antagonism between the senses and the sexes.

Rarefied, romantic, pained, elegant, nocturnal, but above all cinematic – yes, that might be the right adjective to describe The Waiting Room, Tindersticks' 2016 album. Cinematic not just in terms of sound, but because in the deluxe edition every track is accompanied by a short film entrusted to a talented director, among whom the name of Claire Denis stands out, the renowned French filmmaker for whom the band has often scored soundtracks (some excerpts were collected in the anthology “Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009”). Focusing on the music itself, The Waiting Room presents itself as a collection of eleven compositions of remarkable emotional impact, perfectly suited to pushing, with great ambition, the chamber pop of the band led by Stuart Staples in multiple (and never too predictable) directions. It moves from the lush jazzy-style arrangements of “Help Yourself” to the tormented minimalism of voice and synth alone on the title track, from the dreamlike instrumental landscapes of “Follow Me” (a cover of a track from the soundtrack to “Mutiny on the Bounty”), “This Fear Of Emptiness” and “Planting Holes”, to the moving, moonlit ballad “How We Entered”, which ideally merges Nick Cave and Michael Stipe into a single person, right up to the formal hyper-perfection of auteur pop that characterises “Were We Once Lovers”, “Second Chance Man” and “Like Only Lovers Can”.

But that's not all: the Tindersticks' “waiting room” is enriched by the presence of two female voices that provide an extra boost to the record, thanks to two thoroughly successful duets. The first, “Hey Lucinda”, is especially poignant as it features the voice of Lhasa de Sela, who passed away in 2010 from an incurable illness, and who had previously collaborated occasionally with the English band. The second collaboration, decidedly more buzzed-about, is with Jehnny Beth on “We Are Dreamers!”: the leader of the highly rated Savages, currently out with the blistering “Adore Life”, is the perfect counterpoint to Stuart Staples's dramatic delivery.

Bolstered by an astonishing personality, entirely free of weak moments, with an emotional level that's tremendously high, The Waiting Room stands out as a record of unquestionable stature. We don't think we'd be far off the mark in ranking it not only as one of Tindersticks' masterpieces (arguably on a par with their 1993 debut), but even as one of the finest chamber-pop albums of all time.

On 15 November 2019 came No Treasure But Hope, ten new tracks of poetic melancholy, noir, cinematic, nocturnal and wonderfully penetrating. The highlight is “Trees Fall”, with its flavour of something ancient, those strings, and melodies that slowly take over, in a crescendo that doesn't erase but rather feeds the bittersweet aftertaste. Stuart A. Staples took three years to follow up one of the finest chapters of his discography. In the meantime he undertook a couple of solo projects, before returning to the full band once he found himself with the right songs. The sound, and also the vocal phrasing, still look to Nick Cave and Lambchop, but today everything is unmistakably Tindersticks. A twilit imagery in which sadness can be gathered in handfuls, among open spaces and soundtracks for imaginary films.

No Treasure But Hope is in keeping with the group's established aesthetic. Although it was written almost entirely on the Greek island of Ithaca (where Staples has made his home for some time now), the Hellenic sun and sea haven't dented the existentialist poetics, the inner malaise. Treasures and hopes take shape amid the soul aspirations of “Pinky In The Daylight”, the piano softness of “Carousel”, the precious roundness of “Take Care In Your Dreams” and “Tough Love”. So much beauty, so much poetry. Enough to leave you stunned…

Stuart Staples has repeatedly insisted that Distractions (City Slang, 2021) is not a pandemic album, that it isn't a record reacting to lockdown. Pressed further, he then conceded that, inevitably, circumstances did end up shaping the creative process, the dark tones of the songs, the obsessive grooves. Tindersticks' fourteenth studio album is indeed a very dark one. The pastel colours of the 2019 No Treasure But Hope cover are replaced by artwork in an elegant midnight blue; the hope of the old title gives way to the need to distract oneself, to look elsewhere.

Of the seven tracks on Distractions' tracklist, as many as three are covers. It's therefore easy to draw a parallel with last year's “This (Is What I Wanted To Tell You)”, an album made up entirely of covers by fellow transatlantic chamber-pop act Lambchop. As one might expect, and rightly so, Tindersticks' covers are anything but simple rehashes of the originals. Staples, Boulter, Fraser and Harvin extract the pulp of other people's songs and dress it in new, elegant garb. Neil Young's “A Man Needs A Maid” becomes a candlelit ballad with a soothing female counter-melody, while Dory Previn's “Lady With The Braid” is fitted with a synthetic rhythm and skeletal keyboard chimes. Among the covers, though, “You'll Have To Scream Louder” by Television Personalities stands out, its political lashes wound around a nagging rhythm that would have tickled the fancy of Andrew Weatherall (how we miss him!) for an indietronic remix to dance to live on Zoom.

Apart from the orchestral flourishes that blossom towards the end of “I Imagine You”, all the original songs too are ramshackle and skeletal, arranged in a way that leaves the scaffolding, the bare bones, exposed. “Man Alone (Can't Stop The Fadin')” is a long piece of icy indietronica, letting Staples' psychotic sobs echo into the void of his own personal “Frankie Teardrop”; “Tue-Moi” is a bare piano ballad in French, wounded by the tragedy of the Bataclan. Closing things out is a valley of tears and tuxedos running over nine and a half minutes, titled “The Bough Bends”, with Staples singing in a cone of shadow and the rest of the crew sketching the emptiness around him with long, mournful notes and a dissolved rhythm.

Ever since Stuart Staples left London for France, the band's elegant orchestral settings have grown more austere, and their leader has shed the role of romanticism's chastiser, embracing instead a soul sensibility that has refreshed his still masterful songs of lost love. On Soft Tissue (2024), having swept away the baroque aesthetic and reinvigorated the sound through live-in-studio recording, Tindersticks adorn their new songs with strings and horns without ever obscuring their fragile beauty. The singing is passionate, but amid the shadows of melancholy there's a lot more light. “Nancy” is just another of the many female characters who populate Staples & co.'s songs; it's only the instrumental garments that are lighter and more imaginative, intoxicated by a raw rumba beat that seems to sway its hems. And it's more than a mere cameo when Terry Edwards and his trumpet appear in the sensual, tormented whirl of “Always A Stranger”, one of the record's most intense moments, alongside the aching “The Secret Of Breathing”, a noir ballad resting on a faint, breath-like pulse, with a delicate orchestral arrangement that craves neither emphasis nor glory.

Soft Tissue is unquestionably Tindersticks' most soul album, not only because the horns and a sprightly groove complete with female backing vocals dominate the scene on “New World”, or because yet another duet with Gina Foster carries a whiff of Tamla Motown-style sound (“Turned My Back”), but because of that decisive, captivating orchestral-funk turn that lingers in the background after the powerful Philly-sound explosion of “Don't Walk, Run”.

In this ongoing search for feelings and bitterness, Stuart Staples retains the poise of the narrator-poet with a sensibility that evokes Leonard Cohen (“Falling, The Light”) and a romanticism that, even when dressed in more elegant and lavish sounds, remains pure and crystalline (“Soon To Be April”).

Strange as it may sound, Soft Tissue is in many ways the album that could finally win over new fans beyond the band's core following, even if Tindersticks' magic moment now seems to have faded.

Never seduced by the allure of success, Stuart Staples has chosen the magic of twilight over the glare of the spotlight, consistently cultivating the almost cinematic attitude of his music, confident that one day someone, catching its beauty, might make it their own – because what ultimately sets Tindersticks' new album apart is a sense of deep empathy that brings to life music that is familiar yet still utterly singular.

Against the fleeting nature of alternative trends, excess, and the urge to impress at all costs, Tindersticks set the sober refinement of a timeless chamber-pop and the only seemingly ordinary quality of a fragile emotional authenticity, which finds its fullest expression in a romantic journey through the depths of the human soul, translated into songs steeped in great class, intensity and an uncommon sense of melody.

Contributions by Francesco Amoroso ("The Hungry Saw", "Falling Down A Mountain"), Mimma Schirosi ("The Something Rain", "Across Six Leap Years"), Claudio Lancia ("The Waiting Room", "No Treasure But Hope"), Michele Corrado ("Distractions"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Soft Tissue")

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