Tindersticks turn 25 this year. It’s a remarkable feat for any band, but even more impressive than the Nottingham outfit’s longevity is their consistency. Tindersticks have never released a bad album (or even a middling one), never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character. The skies in their world may be forever gray, but the clouds are always moving and morphing, letting in the faintest flickers of light that change the size and shape of the shadows they cast.
The richly atmospheric, nicotine-stained quality of the Tindersticks’ music makes it an ideal complement to TV shows and films, whether their songs are soundtracking pivotal scenes on "The Sopranos" or comprising entire scores for French art-house maverick Claire Denis. But on The Waiting Room, that dynamic is reversed: the band handed off its 11 tracks to various filmmaker friends (including Denis, Christoph Girardet, Pierre Vinour, and Gregorio Graziosi) as inspirational fodder for accompanying short films packaged with deluxe editions of the record. The album opens with a cover of Polish composer Bronislau Kaper’s "Follow Me," aka the theme song from the 1962 film adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty; in Tindersticks’ hands, the original’s tiki-torch splendor is given a gritty makeover that pushes it closer to Midnight Cowboy territory. It’s a perfect scene-setter—The Waiting Room may not feature any songs about oceanic expeditions, but the band sure know their way around tales of backstabbing and betrayal.
Yet for all the band’s filmic qualities, the action in frontman Stuart Staples' lyrics is always more psychological than physical. The weightless Wurlitzer tones of "Second Chance Man" and "Were We Once Lovers?" respectively set Staples’ inner turmoil against brassy swells and disorienting disco. And just as the latter track appears to achieve liftoff, Staples delivers a dispiriting chorus line—"how can I care if it’s the caring that’s killing me?"—that forsakes rapture for rupture.
The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain. On "Help Yourself," an uncharacteristically louche Staples shakes off his troubles by swaggering onto the floor of the Shrine in Lagos circa '72 (and the novelty of the Tindersticks going Afrobeat is savvily mirrored by Denis’ companion clip, which depicts French-Caribbean actor Alex Descas roaming the shopping-mall concourse of a French train station, nonplussed by the white European consumer culture surrounding him). An even more wondrous surprise arrives in the form of "Hey Lucinda," a wobbly-kneed waltz that finds Staples communing with the spirit of the late, great Montreal chanteuse Lhasa de Sela, an occasional Tindersticks collaborator who died of cancer in 2010. It’s like a fleeting reminiscence of someone who’s passed, but one that leaves you smiling from the warm memories rather than weeping over their absence.
The beautifully languid "Hey Lucinda" contrasts sharply with The Waiting Room’s other big-ticket matchup, "We Are Dreamers," which sees Staples joining forces with Jehnny Beth of Savages and the Tindersticks tapping into that band’s brooding menace. It’s the moment where all of The Waiting Room’s mounting tension is finally released, into an outsider anthem that recasts material impoverishment as spiritual empowerment ("You can rob us/ You can trick us/ Peer over our shoulders and steal our ideas") as Beth and Staples’ voices intertwine and overlap before locking into the song’s rallying cry: "This is not us/ We are dreamers!" But in the Tindersticks’ world, every dream is followed by a rude awakening; following that climax, the bitterly fatalistic closer "Like Only Lovers Can" pairs '70s soft-rock sway with a cutting chorus: "We can only hurt each other the way that lovers can/ So where do we go?" Appropriately, many of the visuals that accompany these songs emphasize distance and emptiness: black-and-white footage of a wedding from the '50s; a seaside fairground after the tourists have gone home; taxidermied animals. They’re moments and entities once bustling with life, but which now exist as faded memories or shells of their former selves. And for so long as we pine to make them real again, there will be exquisite Tindersticks songs to help us fill the void.
