Donkeys 92-97 is an anthology that collects tracks not released on the
albums.
Simple Pleasure (Quicksilver, 1999) is not much of an achievement.
The Tindersticks are a big band that simply plays
easy-listening and lounge music (Can We Start Again).
While at the beginning Tindersticks' music was a game of subtle emotions,
the new game is artiness for the sake of artiness.
It is not a coincidence that the band abandons the reliance on string instruments, the trademark of their early recordings.
The Tindersticks had had enough of depressed atmospheres and
Can Our Love (Beggars Banquet, 2001)
emancipates them from the stereotype of gloomy, funereal lounge music.
Horns, strings and keyboards arrangements, not to mention Stuart Staples's
high-pitched crooning, turned to what was basically an overdone version of
rhythm'n'blues balladry and Mephis soul.
If sometimes (Can Our Love)
this sounds like a parody of romantic lounge crooners, the nine-minute
Sweet Release (funky organ, mellow horns and strings)
works at different levels: emotional, structural, and linguistic; i.e., it
moves, it engages and it twists the genre's foundations.
People Keep Comin' Around (flute, sax, violin, electric piano, organ)
and the mildly anthemic Chilitetime (a tribute to the age of psychedelic soul)
could be material for a thesis on revisiting period music.
The album actually opens with a song in their old style, Dying Slowly,
that could be straight from an old Leonard Cohen album
("this dying slowly / seemed better than shooting myself").
One major distraction (not attraction) is represented by Staples' vocals,
that he probably overrates.
All in all, this sounds like second-rate
Van Morrison.
Tinderstick's soundtrack to Trouble Everyday (Connected, 2001),
the band's second collaboration with French director Claire Denis, boasts one
fantastic recreation of their original post-Tom Waits style,
Trouble Every Day, but the rest is monotonous chamber muzak to accompany
the film. It is not an organic flows of music, and it is not a collection
of pretty songs. However, the band as a whole is maturing as a jazz/classical
"auteur" of Gil Evans-ian ambitions and, despite the waste of strings, he proves
to have the talent and the elegance to pull out more complex scores.
Waiting For The Moon (Beggars Banquet, 2003) is a more streamlined
effort, and one of their least innovative.
Until the Morning Comes is their best Leonard Cohen imitation yet:
it will confuse Cohen himself into thinking it's a cover of one of his songs.
Say Goodbye to the City is whispered in a manner that recalls both
Morphine's melancholy and
Nick Cave's poignancy, and then
disheveled by a powerful tornado of horns a` la Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom.
Waiting For The Moon is even more subdued, with a
music-box melody played in the background, an accordion buzzing in the sky
and a violin rising with the wind.
Unfortunately, the group wastes its talent with obnoxious pop ballads
(Sweet Memory, that evoke Morrissey's most uninspired moments, or
Trying To Find A Home, which is basically a variation on John Lennon's
Imagine, or My Oblivion, worthy of Burt Bacharac's orchestral
tortures).
The duet Sometimes It Hurts is undoubtedly catchy and elegant, but
perhaps more appropriate for Elton John
(dance rhythm, romantic violins, female choir).
The Tindersticks are an easy-listening group that is ashamed of admitting it.
Working for the Man (2005) is a retrospective of the early
years, up to Simple Pleasure (1999).
In 2006 multi-instrumentalist Dickon Hinchliffe left the band.
Stuart Staples
composed the soundtrack for Claire Denis' film The Intruder (2005):
a simple, subdued, lifeless loop of percussive noises, plucked guitar and
agonizing trumpet.
Staples then released the solo album Leaving Songs (2006).
Hinchliffe was replaced by the string arrangements of Lucy Wilkins on
The Hungry Saw (2008), whose ballads therefore sound positively like
obnoxious Bacharach muzak.
Falling Down A Mountain (4AD, 2010) was a more eclectic collection
that surveyed the whole universe of pop music from
jazz-rock (Falling Down A Mountain) to Tamla soul
(Harmony Around My Table, one of their catchiest songs ever),
from the Velvet Underground (Black Smoke) to the
ballad (Peanuts, a duet with Mary Margaret O'Hara),
and including
echoes of Ennio Morricone in both the instrumental Hubbard Hills and She Rode Me Down.
Unfortunately most of the songs would have been left out from albums by the
top purveyors of those genres.
The early film soundtracks, including
Rhums (2008) and
White Material (2009),
were collected on
Claire Denis Film Scores: 1996-2009 (2011).
The Something Rain (2012) was another varied set that applied class
and sophisticated to the
nine-minutes spoken-word kammerspiel Chocolate, to the
noir soul-rock Show Me Everything, to the ballad Medicine,
and the usual dose of Morricone in Goodbye Joe,
with even a lively song This Fire of Autumn to shatter the stereotype
of the Tendersticks as funeral music.
If the previous album only had Harmony Around My Table to justify
its existence, this one had at least one ambitious composition and a couple of
accomplished mood pieces.
Staples continued to compose scores for Claire Denis, including the electronic
and ambient Les Salauds (2013) and the
more conventional High Life (2018).
Across Six Leap Years (2013) contains ten
live re-recordings of old songs.
Staples and and McKinna also composed orchestral music for a museum, collected on Ypres (2014), notably
the 20-minute The Third Battle of Ypres in the sustained droning vein of Arvo Part, and the slightly more dramatic
13-minute Whispering Guns Parts 1, 2 and 3.
The Waiting Room (2016) is another dose of
relaxing chamber pop for aging fans.
Staples sometimes sounds like
Leonard Cohen (in the male parts of
Hey Lucinda)
and David Bowie (Were We Once Lovers)
and even
Alan Vega
(the first half of We Are Dreamers).
Staples also composed the soundtrack for and directed the documentary
Minute Bodies (2016), a tribute to naturalist and photographer Frank Percy Smith, a pioneer of time-lapse. The score is not much to talk about but the
visuals are impressive, a collage of original "videos" of living beings made
by Smith.
No Treasure But Hope (2019) is full of inferior songs but it contains
a few decent ones in a variety of styles, from the
sentimental ballad of the 1950s (The Amputees) to
stately orchestral waltz (Pinky in the Daylight).
The musical highlight is an unusually lively song, the
exotic folk dance See My Girls with a hammering piano pattern, an emphatic delivery and an ominous backing voice that recall Nick Cave.