YOU know Tindersticks are still no happier campers after 11 years when rumbling singer Stuart Staples opens their ninth album with the cheery line: "My hands around your throat... if I kill you now".
As always with Tindersticks, there is the languor of waiting in their beautifully sombre ballads: waiting for a change of tempo or mood or love's path; or here waiting for the moon. Not the sun, of course, but the moon, on ten more songs of hurt, oblivion, loneliness and rootless and restless existence, bathed in strings and brass and acoustic guitars. Even gloomier than Scotland's Arab Strap or Australia's Nick Cave in his deepest Cave, Nottingham's Tindersticks grow ever more magnificently maudlin, reaching still further into life's darker recesses in the yearning lament Sweet Memory, the minimalist 4.48 Psychosis and mesmerising Sometimes It Hurts, a swooning duet with French-Canadian chanteuse Lhasa De Sala. Worth its wait in gold.
Updated: 12:16 Thursday, July 24, 2003
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