Tindersticks
Curtains (London)
by Nik Rainey
The rich, bored rock star staggers out of his limo and stands, pondering, before the Chateau Marmont. “The suite Belushi died in or the one where Morrison hung out of the window? I’ll take Jim’s; I could do with a little window-hanging myself tonight.” Your reaction to that line will handily gauge your likely response to the Tindersticks and their third double-LP-sized release, Curtains. If you don’t get what they’re on about, it’s because too many groups are too busy living that line to come up with it. Or maybe it’s just because head ‘stick Stewart Staples recites said line much like he sings elsewhere on the album – in a foggy, anesthetized mumble, like Ian Curtis imitating Lee Hazlewood with a nasty abscess. Or perhaps you did catch that line and managed to pluck out a couple more from the same song – “We are artists. We are sensitive and important” and “My sense of irony is wearing pretty thin,” delivered in that same affectless mutter over a cool, sticky pool of upended cocktail jazz, and you recognize that the irony, in fact, is being slathered on with a trowel. If the latter option applies, then this is your band. For you the Tindersticks are an anti-rock band for our times, the lounge act at the end of the world, the group that wrings the blackest passion out of utter disaffection, the rotting fruit that tastes sweetest of all.
What other band’s idea of “rock” involves dragging a whining, junksick melodica over an impatient backbeat the way most bands rape their guitar strings (“Fast One”)? Or snags both Ann Magnuson and Isabella Rossellini to serve as their Nancy Sinatraesque vocal foils (“Buried Bones” and “A Marriage Made In Heaven,” respectively)? Or utilizes a lone, abstracted accordion rescued from Tom Waits’ junkyard (“Bearsuit”) and an unused Forever Changes backing track (“Let’s Pretend”) to bolster tales of impotence and lovelessness? None but the Tindersticks, I daresay.
This is music that lingers like the hangover that lurks at the end of the long, debauched night of the rock ‘n’ roll soul, a spritz of stale perfume that begins to burn like napalm on your skin, like leaning over the broken, perforated body of the Girl from Ipanema, administering last rites and hoping the coroner will blame it on the bossa nova, the woozy dawn of some velveteen morning when you can feel the profound pain hiding at the outer edge of the numbness you had so carefully constructed on a foundation of pills and booze as the first rays of the mockingly bright sun begin to slice through the cracks you, in your stupor, left in that careless façade. And, like the above-quoted “Ballad of Tindersticks,” I find the whole thing fall-down hilarious. Then again, I think Leonard Cohen’s funnier than “Weird Al” Yankovic, so maybe you shouldn’t ask me.
