Records: Tindersticks' Curtains

By Davd Auerbach

The late, great Dennis Potter once said something like while the emotions expressed in pop songs may be simple and common, those that they inspire in listeners are most certainly not. He was speaking of the songbook era, but the Tindersticks have learned their lesson well. They inhabit a familiar terrain of romantic loss, regret and terror-but the music and phrasings wrapped around their well-worn vocabulary are so nuanced as to be entirely singular.

Tindersticks formed in London out of the remains of several other groups in 1991. Their first album ranks in my "Reason to Live" category for records. Singer Stuart Staples mumbles and swoons along with the panoramic music, enveloping listeners with concerns of love that suddenly seem like the most crucial things in the world.

"Another Night In," which opens the album, may well be the saddest song ever written. Staples croons his way through lyrics of depressed resignation ("Doesn't matter where she is tonight/ or with whoever she spends her time"), underscored by a circular piano quote and a subdued string section. Gradually, acoustics come in and the strings become more insistent, finally reprising the opening verse at twice the volume, where Staples' prior words become a pained plea on the order of Wilson, Drake, or Curtis. Staples' voice has only grown deeper over the years, dropping a register each album, and he sings here with a commanding presence heard once or twice each decade.

Nothing that follows quite matches "Another Night In" for its sentimental but unremitting intensity, but that intensity flickers in different forms throughout the album's 65 minutes. "Don't Look Down" revives the old threat of songs like "Jism" and "El Diablo en el Ojo" in a disorienting tale of (figurative) self-immolation.

"Let's Pretend" builds up a momentous wall of sound before prematurely fading out in tribute to Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," which the group covered to sublime effect a few years back. "Bearsuit" is extremely creepy, and the serene "Dancing" pushes a handful of muted guitar chords into the gentlest, most enraptured statement of desire they've ever attempted, an unabashedly slow-dance number that's too peaceful to dance to. The ghostly "Walking" caps the album on an iridescent note.

The only signs of trouble are an occasional tendency towards archness and self-consciousness on the clip-clopping "Desperate Man" and "Ballad of Tindersticks" (well, how much more self-conscious could you get?). Similarly, attempts to duplicate the success of the second album's duet "Travelling Light" with the Walkabouts' Carla Torgerson pale from bad pairings. On "Burried Bones," Ann Magnuson is too informal and ironic to be a serious foil for Stewart, and Isabella Rossellini (on the bonus track "A Marriage Made in Heaven," an obscure Sub Pop remake) simply can't sing. And Huggy Bear's Nikki Sin was much better on the original.

These are trivial carps, because this is the best album since, well, the last Tindersticks album. It's too British and sincere for the American crowd, but that shouldn't stop you, discerning record connoisseur, from being moved by Curtains. As proof, I offer the live version of Pavement's "Here" on the "Bathtime Part 2" single, which upturns the vocal line to transform the modest original into a thing of majesty. It's that obsessive attention to treatment, in both their own and others' songs, that gives the Tindersticks' music its true substance.

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