Mellow drama

It's not Curtains for Tindersticks

by Barney Hoskyns

It used to be easy to dismiss Tindersticks -- to deride them as boho poseurs, wanna-be Nick Caves, provincial boys who moved from Nottingham to London and willingly sank into the capital's romantic squalor. When the band's first album -- Tindersticks -- appeared in October 1993, the whole 'Sticks shtick looked and sounded contrived. Songs like "Drunk Tank" and "City Sickness" suggested a bunch of neophytes mooching about dank taverns and kidding themselves it would all pay off one day in a novel.

But when you actually heard a Tindersticks song or saw the group live -- just the six of them sans string ensemble -- the beauty of the thing hit you between the eyes. Suddenly the packaging no longer got in the way of what the music was doing, and Stuart Staples's dark, mumbly baritone sounded 10 times lovelier than Nick Cave's. Suddenly the hopeless gloom and ennui of "Drunk Tank" or "City Sickness" took on a quality of profound melancholy. Even if the whole thing was an act, it didn't matter anymore.

Two events made me a Tindersticks convert. One was hearing their "Talk to Me" on the radio as I drove around London one wet night and being bowled over by an insistent drama that -- albeit in more languorous form -- didn't seem so far from the dread and claustrophobia evoked by Ian Curtis on "Love Will Tear Us Apart." The second was seeing the band play London's Astoria Theatre and marveling at the suspense and chemistry of their performance. Sounding one moment like a jaunty Gypsy band, the next like some enervated palm-court quartet, they played with a conviction and intensity that put their Britpop contemporaries (i.e., Oasis and Blur) to shame.

By then Tindersticks had already proved there was substance behind the pose with the second Tindersticks, which was released in 1995. Even here there were things that didn't quite come off: the portentous intro that was "El Diablo en el Ojo," the literally soporific "Sleepy Song," the strings that slid about a tad too drunkenly. But the way "A Night In" slowly built itself up, the way the waltzing "She's Gone" seemed to hover off the ground, the way the descending piano chords of "No More Affairs" reinvented the Lou Reed of "Perfect Day" -- this showed how great Tindersticks could be when they got it right. Sometimes Staples was barely singing, and he could have been a jaundiced Jarvis Cocker. At other times his voice was as big and cavernous as Scott Walker's.

Now, following last year's little-heard soundtrack for the French film Nenette et Boni, Tindersticks return with a CD that at one point (with the band on the verge of splitting up) was destined to bear the title The Last Tindersticks Album. Instead it's called Curtains (London). It's the group's most focused and satisfying opus yet -- a disc that's given them a profound new lease on life. The loss and anguish are laid on less thickly. If "Another Night In" picks up where Staples's moodiness left off in 1995, songs like "Don't Look Down" find the singer closer to rapture, enveloped in the swirling, John Barry-like string arrangements of Dickon Hinchcliffe.

Most of the tempos on Curtains are on the slow side, and the songs boast the kind of spare, non-rock instrumentation (acoustic guitars, vibes, strings, harmonium, snare rimshots) the Tindersticks have favored in the past. "Rented Rooms," set to a lazily swaying rhythm, stars our hero Staples as a kind of unshaven Lothario feverishly searching for a room in which to copulate. But Staples has grown less in thrall to a pseudo-literary idea of despair. "Buried Bones," a duet with former Bongwater chanteuse Ann Magnuson, brings to mind Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue (or Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood) singing a Beautiful South song.

The strangest track, given the band's general reticence and mistrust of fame, is the seven-and-a-half-minute "Ballad of Tindersticks," a "Story of Them"-style account of the pop-star life that reads like a hastily scrawled entry from Staples's diary. Delivered in a bored monotone that vaguely recalls the John Cale of Songs to Drella, this one takes us from New York to LA's Chateau Marmont, where Staples is offered a choice between the John Belushi and Jim Morrison bungalows, and thence to London's Atlantic Bar & Grill, where the "exclusive door policy" is "exclusively for assholes." Against the smooth organ tones and vibrato guitar accents, Staples asks himself, "When do you lose the ability to step back and get a sense of your own ridiculousness?"

The point, of course, is that Tindersticks aren't really interested in the world of "Ballad of Tindersticks." They're now ready to continue to keep their heads down, out of the glare of publicity. And their music continues to resonate for people tired of blaring guitars and flashy ephemera.

The Last Tindersticks Album? May the curtain never come down on them.