Tindersticks: a name so good they kept on using it

What an album cover! I raved some months ago about the cover of Depeche Mode's 'A broken frame', and this is another stand-out, despite appearing incongrously as a picture in a character's house in Coronation Street some years ago. I haven't tracked down the original source. As well as the image, the word that appears is just wonderful.

What a name, and so beautiful it was not just used for the band, but also the album, and then their second album too. I must admit, if I had come up with a word so musical, so lyrical, so gentle, I would use it 'til it gagged too. I do have a theory that the name may have come from a Sude B-side, whose name escapes me but was on 'Sci-fi lullabies' some years ago (hilariously mislabelled by a Cork radio station at the time as 'Hi-fi melodies', which could not possibly be further from a likely Suede album title).

Anyway, this post is partly inspired by waiting for the new Tindersticks album, 'Falling down a mountain', but also by the fact that this must rank as one of my favourite debut albums ever. I have mentioned previously that I have a habit of buying each Christmas an album that appears on many critics' end-of-year best-of lists, and in this year (1992?) I bought Tindersticks on the basis of it's topping the now-gone Melody Maker's list. There are some albums which I can clearly remember my first hearing of, and this was one, as I bought it on casette in an underground (literally) record shop in Dublin called Freebird Records, and can recall slipping the tape into my walkman (it really was the dark ages) and letting 'Nectar' wash over me, sounding like nothing else I had heard to date, with the velvety hushed vocals and complex arrangements and warm dark atmosphere.

This is just an incredible album, sounding like no-one else (not even, to me, the Bad Seeds, to which it was most frequently compared), with huge ambition, long songs, and fragments and snippets, with it even being hard to match song names on the tape sleeve to actual tracks. It had (relatively) loud and angry bits (as discussed below) but its magic resides in the calm and still of songs like the astonishing 'Blood' (it has often hard to hear exactly what Stuart Staples is singing, but it may just contain the wonderful chorus line 'Where does the blood go, that runs away from broken hearts...'), 'Piano song' and 'Raindrops'.

The album's most high-profile (again, in relative terms) song (not sure if it was actually a single) is the great 'City Sickness', which encapsulates much of the albums faded grandeur, inherent sadness of purpose, and orchestral ambition (fully realised in later years by the band, as will be explored in later posts). I think I remember hearing in an interview at the time that they had a small number of strings which they recorded over and over (or something far more technical) to achieve the sound of massed violins, but however they did, it sounds great:

The nastier, dirtier side of the album (which I don't love as much at extremes like 'Paco de Renaldo's dream' and 'Her') does come across very effectively in the film noir menace of 'Jism':

I will finish with the quite breathtaking sound of 'The not knowing', which must be simply the most unexpected song to appear on an album by any band who could be even loosely said to be related to the genre known as rock music. This sounds like the clash between my music and classical music to me.

Obviously, debut albums by any band have the huge significance of capturing what it is that made them want to be in a band, and capture their life experience and ambition to that point, a far greater span than between any subsequent albums which also bear the baggage of their earlier work's reception and any fan's expectations. The debut, on the other hand, is like fresh snow and unspoiled, and sets out their stall. What a stall Tindersticks set out here, which they rarely topped in subsequent years, although their next albums (all 7?) all contain moments of beauty and wonder (they had not even discovered how incredibly they could duets, for example, in their first album), as I will come back to.