Tindersticks

This carefully curated chronological collection ‘Past Imperfect: 92 – 21 proffers a selection of one of the UK’s most seductively productive and singularly independent groups, Nottingham’s Tindersticks.

A group that has criminally never (right)fully dented the UK chart-buying public’s consciousness finding more favour in Belgium and France, producing fourteen studio albums and numerous film scores notably with French auteur Claire Denis. ‘Willow’ as sung by Robert Pattinson in the film ‘High Life’ is here reclaimed by the band with new track ‘Both sides of the blade’ from Denis’ latest film ‘Avec amour et acharnament’ completing the collection.

Split into four sections/two halves the twenty tracks span and scan thirty years of uniquely British faltered cabaret, equally Euro-paean enamel-‘n’ cholic melodies and maladies that has witnessed numerous iterations of the group with the trio of Stuart. A. Staples, Neil Fraser (guitar) and David Boulter (various instruments) ever present.

Whether whispering sweet somethings to anyone or incomplete anythings to someone the artistry of Tindersticks arms, charms and disarms, all at once and when you least suspect it.

Staples’s distinctive vocals are a cross between a long-in-the-truth gruff social club crooner, a masterful modern chanson singer and supreme storyteller/faded glory-seller. Regaling vignettes of tangled and tattered dreams, flattered screams, cracked visions and blurred rueful recriminations and resolved rapprochements backed by sublime orchestration and sweeping, soaring symphonic sojourns of the imagination and beyond.

Similar to Lambchop in the US, Tindersticks ornately articulate and narrate the tales and travails of wide screen dreams of small town scenes, internal and infernal monologues transmitted as external and eternal dialogues, full of monochromatic-home roots and technicolour escape routes, a splash in the panoramic and all achieved with a mixture of brevity, levity and longevity.

Sadly only (the admittedly glorious) ‘City Sickness’ makes it from their self-titled debut from 1993. That said, as an entrée it sets the tone and throws the listener a bountiful bone: moody, mellow-emphatic, Morricone in a Mackintosh.

1995’s ‘Travelling Light’ (a duet with The Walkabouts’ Carla Torgerson) and ‘Tiny Tears’ capture the group as kitchen-sink poets, who know it and show it, delicate, intricate, immaculate.

2003’s ‘Sometimes it hurts’ (a duet with the late American-Canadian singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela) is the epitome of the frail realities of relations as bleak realisation dawns upon a once bright union. The duo toing and froing their viewpoints with the immortal lyric ‘What once burned so brightly is all but smoke in the air’ eloquently embodying the detritus, the debris and dust of past that’s passed.

2016’s ‘Were we once lovers’ updates Bryan Ferry’s ‘Lounge Lizard’ persona (it ‘is’ a persona …isn’t it?) and transports our protagonist from glitzy environs to the chintzy Labour Club, stale aftershave, booze and smoke impinge upon the souls of the bar-crossed paramours, time’s elapsing creating cracked hearts and broken futures, one of split possessions and endless concessions.

Each song could command an essay of its own, hidden riches with every listen. Treat this as a primer to explore, investigate and disseminate the rest of this group’s catalogue, here are some snatched of thirty years of wondrous stories and lustrous glories, forever developing and enveloping.

Here’s’ to the next thirty.