Tindersticks
Can our Love...
Beggars Banquet 2001

Tindersticks: I hardly need to explain. They’re practically a brand. This is misery and self-destruction, but we’re not talking grunge and smack. This is cigarettes and red wine, dark suits and a general desire to be French. If there’s one thing that holds me back from total adoration, it’s the fact that they seem to enjoy being miserable so damn much. All the same, this is a good record.

Stuart Staples’s voice is as fine as ever, a kind of luscious, tragic croon. The first song, ‘Dying Slowly’, tells you just how it’s going to go. ‘This dying slowly,’ he sings happily, ‘is better than shooting myself.’ There’s a Spanish strum to the guitar and violins do their mournful violin thing. Then we’re off through doomed love affairs and a pleasant sparseness of instrumentation, as the band sit at the bar, wreathed in smoke, ordering another absinthe, even though it’s three in the morning (or possibly the afternoon).

There’s a new ingredient, too. On ‘Sweet Release’ there’s a hint of smoochy funk which fits so perfectly with the sad violins and the little organ refrain that you can’t believe everyone hasn’t been doing it all along. They’re laying it on with a trowel, but somehow I’m going to let them off.