Tindersticks
Tindersticks (Bar/None A-HAON 046)

Tindersticks is one of those bands who is doing something so obliquely original that you can't quite pinpoint what they sound like. Describing the music to someone who hasn't heard them is a chore, because even rattling off a litany of somewhat similar artists doesn't really give a clear picture of what the music is actually like.

Bryan Ferry with his teeth kicked in and a bad heroin habit, backed by American Music Club? Tom Waits, if he'd never sold a record and ended up like Ed Wood, living in absolute squalor but continuing to make music for no audience? Serge Gainsbourg collaborating with Galaxie 500 and the Kronos Quartet on a concept album about Charles Bukowski? Jim Morrison, had he lived, doing an early 90s comeback album with John Cale? Belle & Sebastian in an insane asylum rather than a prep school? Joey Ramone suddenly getting way too into Baudelaire?

Whatever it is, it's bleak music from some very real hell, and yet in its way it's pretty crystalline and beautiful. Highly personal, dark and uncompromising, and genuinely answering to no one on what it's supposed to be. Indie-rock guitars and drums meld with chamber strings, flutes, brass and organs for soundscapes that are alternately soothing, creepy, confusing, pleasing, miserable and wonderful.

A lot of one's enjoyment of Tindersticks (their debut album, from '93) depends on one's tolerance of singer Stuart Staples's slurred and understated vocal delivery; he makes Leonard Cohen look like a good singer and late-period Chet Baker sound like a real pro. The band is mixed low and dense, with sounds wafting in and out, and overall the effect is sort of like overhearing an album that you were never meant to hear.

I'd love this album to pieces if it had a female singer, but I'm sadly biased against male angst, since I have so much of my own to spare. As with many indie bands with a "sound," the individual songs don't stand out as much, but even so, while the album is playing it's a pretty comfortable (if somewhat unsettling) place to be. I don't come away humming anything, but that's not always the most important thing, is it?

Certainly this CD is much more permanent than most British indie bands gave us in the early 90s. The songs veer from extremely pretty to cacophonous on a moment's notice, and even the sweet ones are sweet in a "Twin Peaks" kind of way. Straight-ahead indie rock collides with drunken calliope music and funereal strings, with no particular fixed musical style prevailing. The whole affair is pretty scary, but incredibly intriguing, like a bus crash with lots and lots of broken and bloodied bodies to witness.

I've probably not said anything helpful about this CD – those who have heard it will already have their own mental images of what it is, and those who haven't will still not know what to expect. That's probably brilliance.

It won't surprise me if Tindersticks become legends 30 years from now, but with music as fragmented as it is nowadays, they may just end up unsung and unknown outside of the devoted few who are brave enough to seek them out. I'm not inspired to put this album on much, but it's nearly impossible to say it's not great music.

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Review by Darkfart