On the Tindersticks website recently, there was a video splash page announcing the new album that featured footage of the band playing its title track and introducing them one at a time. The first member mentioned was keyboardist and co-founder David Boulter. He's one of the architects of the band's sound, and his piano and organ have been signatures of the band for almost 20 years. And in the video he was playing... tambourine. His big moment on camera didn't show him doing what he does best. There is something perversely appropriate about this-- Tindersticks have always made music that thrives on their lack of egos, and here Boulter was just doing what the song asks for.
The track in question is an odd one, opening the band's eighth album (not counting soundtracks), and in terms of vocals it's more of a mantra than a song. There are three lines of lyrics, sung over and over in different combinations by smoky-voiced Stuart Staples and bassist Dan McKinna as the band provides jazzy drumming and wiry guitar figures. Longtime collaborator and satellite band member Terry Edwards plays sputtering trumpet, and the word is that he wasn't allowed to listen to it while playing-- they just told him what it sounded like. That kind of creative process-- encouraging the happy accident-- and the overall dialogue-ish approach to building a song that marks Falling Down a Mountain as an attempt to re-energize the veteran band.
This is their second album since half of the original sextet quit. Its predecessor, 2008's The Hungry Saw, exhibited some of the same tentativeness. They are, in a sense, a new band living in the long shadow of an old one. Their first three albums were difficult masterpieces, their next few strange explorations of soul music, their sixth a summary and a farewell. Albums seven and eight have been relaxed and seemingly unconcerned with besting the old stuff. That's probably for the best, as it lets them crank out the kind of simple pleasures that seem to flow naturally from them. On this album, that's evident on low-volume lullaby "Keep You Beautiful", which is like a Willie Mitchell production stripped to its barest, topped by a guy with molasses for vocal chords. Elsewhere, "Factory Girls" is a simple but lush piano-led ballad that lets Staples play around in his upper register as he licks romantic wounds and ruminates on aging. It stays sparse until its final minute, when the whole band comes in to lift him up.
McKinna and the other new members, drummer Earl Harvin and guitarist David Kitt, provide Tindersticks with something they've never had before: a backing vocal section that can go call-and-response with Staples. They do it best on "Black Smoke", a Velvet Underground-type groove that features plenty of backing harmonies and a crazy sax part that sounds like it wandered off from a Roxy Music session. The Latin-flavored "She Rode Me Down" is another standout, pulling the band together into a rhythmic juggernaut. At the complete opposite end of things is "Peanuts", a spartan duet between Staples and singer/actress Mary Margaret O'Hara that never gets anywhere-- it's sparse to the point of boring, and next to past duet highlights like "Travelling Light" it pales completely.
Especially during its quietest moments, this album is almost more like the memory of a song than the song itself. It leaves a very hazy, almost spectral impression when it ends. But it's also warm and in some ways comforting, and it improves the more you listen to it and tease out the details in the songs. Tindersticks Mk II seems to be hitting its stride and discovering where its real creative chemistry lies.
