w/Crooked Fingers Thurs Aug 7, Showbox, 8 pm, $20 adv.
What can and can't be considered pop music ("pop" as in the besotted bubblegum variety) is a debate topic likely to either end or strengthen friendships--and possibly even forge brand-new alliances when, in a multi-opinionated forum, someone is discovered to have the same sideways point of view as yours. Having said that, I wonder what the legion of Nick Cave-loving black-eyeliner types will have to say when I voice my opinion that Tindersticks are a pop band.
A little background: I don't brood. And I tend to ignore people who do brood until they are quite finished, at which point I'll happily pick up where we left off until the next thunderhead forms. Music that broods heavily, on the other hand, is among my favorite kinds--so long as there's a love song blooming within. That said, I fail to see the difference between the Neil Diamond-penned Monkees hit "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)" ("I see all kinds of sorrow/Wish I only loved one/Look out, here comes tomorrow/Oh how I wish tomorrow would never come") and this Tindersticks lyric from "Raindrops": "We sit and listen to our hearts crumble/With our only chance to jump/neither of us had the guts/Maybe we're just too proud/to say it out loud."
Rich-baritoned Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples' involutional melancholia translates dashed romanticism into besotted hope. It's to his delight that the U.S. is currently receptive to anguished expression across several rock and pop genres--most impressively a return to the theatrical (some might say overblown) brooding of mid-'90s British bands such as Gallon Drunk. (Fans of Scott Walker should also take note.) Speaking by phone from his hotel room in France, Staples sounds excited by the prospect of a North American tour, especially when trends are leaning toward "a return to the 'real' thing, real emotion like sweat and guts," he says. "It gives you hope when people are expressing things that way, you know?"
After a couple of well-received singles and an EP were released between 1992 and 1993, Tindersticks made their self-titled, full-length debut in October 1993. Tindersticks was a tumescent, 80-minute account of despair and longing, enhanced by strings and sung by a man who sounded like his only downtime between reaching the end of his rope and grabbing on to another was a roaring bender. Heartache provides the time-held, glamorous luxury of wallowing in booze and squalor--and though it was epic in scope, the timeless Tindersticks, with songs such as "Whiskey and Water" and "Raindrops," was exciting to hear. Most of America (the non-Anglophile music fans, at least), however, just wasn't ready for it.
I wonder if it's not just the U.S. that is currently looking back? Are other like-minded British bands gearing up after rediscovering their musical history as well? "I haven't felt it, I suppose," says Staples. "The biggest thing I've felt recently is that most of the big excitement in the UK comes from America at the moment. Perhaps it's just a reaction to, well, it's felt like for a long time, just in general--I'm not saying it goes across everything--but with technology becoming the norm and people exploring that, perhaps some people don't want to play in other people's idea of what a band should be. I think bands are always made up of very different personalities. If you've got somebody with something to say, and they have the capabilities to do it all on their own, the music can become thought-through and one-dimensional."
Waiting for the Moon, released in July, was a departure for the six-piece band in the sense that Tindersticks booked a studio a year ahead of time and then spent those 12 months writing thoughtfully (instead of writing just before it was time to record), affording them a certain freedom of spontaneity once they did enter the studio. "I think we caught something on tape that we found fascinating," explains Staples, "that made us want to chase it through to the end without really understanding where it came from. The song 'My Oblivion' is us playing it together for only the second or third time. It has more to do with finding the right moment to start to play it, and for everybody to get on it and catching that moment on tape. The thing you look for when playing in a band is the ability to escape or lose yourself in your surroundings, and we wanted to believe in those moments when you are lost, you can catch them. After 11 years of playing together, we thought that was important for this record.
"I suppose looking back over what we'd done and the music that we'd made, [making Waiting for the Moon] still provided a fascination for us. That's something you can't go looking for."
