Review Summary: Watching the days go by isn’t half the fun it used to be..
In ways, Tindersticks are a quintessential workhorse. Since Stuart Staples and Dickon Hinchliffe disbanded their Asphalt Ribbons and then reformed all its members under the Tindersticks name in 1991, the band have put their head down and patiently churned. Churned through the rise and fall of indie and Tindersticks’ own cult status. Through the loss of founding members, mucked attempts at shifting sounds and Staples’ solo machinations. Through fellow romantic pessimists Beat Happening and Silver Jews vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again. Through Andrew Lauder’s This Way Up Records, Beggars Banquet and a stretch of independent labels so obscure even the most encyclopedic enthusiast would be hard-pressed to rattle them off. Through The National making a cottage industry out of their patented brand of honeyed melancholy. Like a brick-headed beetle they’ve crawled through all of it, diffidently but stubbornly, writing some damn gorgeous songs in the process.
Back in my uni days, there was a professor of Marxism at my school. A scrawny balding little guy who carried all the arrogance that tenure and academic status can provide. Despite making decent money, he was always on the bum. I remember he spent one winter barely coming to class because his car had blown a tire and he couldn’t get the scratch together to replace it. His classes were annoyingly underlined by mentions of Occam razors and Wittgenstein ladders and a fake British accent to boot. The semester I took with him was also marked by him dating a 17-year old first year. Arts departments in universities are like small vitriolic towns. It doesn’t take long to get a reputation going and once you got it, it’s all too hard to shake it off. Needless to say his lifestyle didn’t lend itself to many dinner party invitations. Aside from dalliances with students and the general feeling of superiority he got from presiding over a roomful of callow kids, his life was a solitary one. He walked into a bar I worked at last year on a slow Monday night, and after drowning half a bottle of gin, weepily confessed that listening to Tindersticks at night were the scarce moments when he still felt proper, still involved in the world around him, still felt human, to put a prosaic spin on it.
All this isn’t to say that bands like Tindersticks make music solely aimed at down in the dumps middle-aged men who are mired in petty existentialism. Though at face value, their music does have that feeling of monochromatic tie and flannelled shirt firmly tucked in. And these men really don’t have to be as depressive and sinister as the Marxism prof. What it is however, is the music of grown-up heartbreak. Measured and contemplative and all the more ruinous for it. On some levels, I can understand the prof dating the young girl. You look in the mirror one day, you’ve got a gut that’s there to stay and a hairline on the way out, and it might just be your last chance to screw something beautiful. Lost time becomes more than a passing regret at some point. It becomes crisis, a catastrophic loss.
That feeling of loss haunts “Waiting for the Moon.” For all the beauty and doe-eyed stardust these songs hold, they’re also dark and resigned and misanthropic. I could list off the best cuts here, but there’s hardly any need. Tindersticks were always a band that made albums, not singular songs.
So listen to it. To the low pinched baritone of a man who knows poetic grief better than a French New Wave flick. To drums that shuffle creakily and saccharine organ lines. To strings that manage the middle line of hopeful gloom without diving into either schmaltz or onanism. To songs so quietly devastating that you don’t notice your heart turn to shrapnel.
