Tindersticks :: The Waiting Room

Hey, we could put on our shoes / we can celebrate when our hearts break and go laughing to that noose…”

homepageThat line, from “Slippin’ Shoes” off Tindersticks’ 2012 LP Something Rain, reads as something of a thesis statement for the Nottingham band, now 25 years into its career and sounding fresh, vibrant and brilliant as ever. That record and their latest, the recently released The Waiting Room, find the band at a creative peak — flourishing the melancholy and maudlin with beautiful visions of light and streaks of orchestral jazz. Stuart Staples is a master vocalist, employing his voice to convey the dramatic, the sentimental and the sullen. His poetry is draped in a swirl of organs, strings, horns, glockenspiels – a noir landscape for his observations on mystery, nostalgia, regret, beauty and hope.

The Waiting Room begins with the plaintive instrumental “Follow Me,” led by a chromatic harmonica (shades of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme are immediately conjured), with tribal drumming and shimmering strings quietly playing underneath. We first hear Staples on “Last Chance Man.” His gloomy, entrancing vocals dimming the lights alongside a mournful organ. “I found love / before I could identify it / I found grace / before I could be mystified it,” he sings, a late realization at a love that enlightened him. As the percussion and saxophones start to ascend, Staples approaches a second chance. The horns sounds like a new lease on life as Staples promises to do it right this time, his cadence picking up speed. He’s feeling it all this time; this is where he thrives: the last chance.

“Were We Once Lovers?” features a restrained funk rhythm, with drops of bubbling organ and a bouncy bass line. The title, a question that feels doomed to go unanswered, sends Stuart through a hazy, half-remembered past. Touches, kisses, tears — they’re just shapes and shadows in his mind now, fleeting and intangible. “Did I take your number? / Did I call? / Did we spend our lives together? / I can’t recall.” It’s another forlorn trip down a sea of regret, ultimately leading Stuart to the essential question — “How can I care if it’s the caring that’s killing me?” We lose him to muttering, drowned out by strings and guitar. However, if that track restrains itself to make room for Stuart’s searching, its follow-up, “Help Yourself,” lets it all hang out. Perhaps the funkiest tune the band has laid down, it’s led by soaring, soulful horns, triumphant and topped by a swaggering, limber Stuart, singing in a cool, detached demeanor about having no charisma, no love, no escape. Is it posturing? The world Stuart lives in is misted with visions, illusions, dreams, nightmares, highs and lows. “Take what you can / make yourself a man,” he sings. Is it a drug song? Probably. It’s got the cocaine strut of Bowie’s Thin White Duke, and the funkiness to back it up. But don’t overlook the subtext: This is a veil, a cloak.

“Hey Lucinda” is the album’s centerpiece and its highlight. Stuart duets with Lhasa De Sela, his “Lucinda.” Glockenspiel twinkles with a funereal organ as Stuart sings to, calls up, perhaps exchanges letters with, Lucinda, an old friend, maybe an old lover. He wants her to come out drinking with him tonight; the summer’s almost gone. Time, capital T, is running out. The path to Lucinda’s house will be too treacherous with frost in the winter. An eternal frost feels suggested here, made all the more haunting by the fact that De Sela would tragically pass away after the recording of this song. Her weary, breathy vocals counter Stuart’s baritone advances, as platonic as they might actually be. Lucinda is tired; she wants to stay home tonight. “Our time is running out,” Stuart urges her. “I may be waiting for you,” she dispassionately replies. Come, don’t come; it seems Lucinda has stopped giving a shit. The booze, the cigarettes, they have revealed themselves to her as a cloak over the “feelings we should show.” Horns flutter about, strings swell and descend. The nostalgia, the love between these two, worn on Stuart’s sleeve but buried somewhere deep down in Lucinda’s heart, sweeps across this piece like a late summer breeze. Being in a moment, all the while knowing that the moment is actively passing and, in an instant, will become a memory. Suddenly, the song goes quiet. “We could find some dancing,” Stuart desperately suggests, a flourish of steel drum kicking in to support his cause. “I only dance to remember how dancing used to feel,” Lucinda replies. Stone cold — a woman truly lost to time. What happened to Lucinda, why does she prefer to spend her time with college guys than with an old, beloved friend? “They drink to the future, not to forget the past,” she tells him. All the instruments — steel drum, strings, horns, all the emotions, and Stuart and Lucinda themselves — swell together in a breathtaking flurry, as their time runs out.

“This Fear of Emptiness,” a kind of eastern-inflected chamber-jazz instrumental, is led by what sounds like that chromatic harmonica again. Returned, to lead us into the second half of this record. And again it mystifies, blurs sorrow and optimism. The sound of that moment of just waking up, the blank slate dissipating into the dense, messy collage of your life, its past, present and future. The gorgeous chamber pop of “This Is How He Entered” finds Stuart describing a lost man coming in from nowhere, “falling from the back of a transit van.” He cuts onions and tells them his stories through songs, “a sliver of a dream,” “the last chance”, “the fear of emptiness.” A man beaten down by life, with a checkered past of broken hearts and a pocket full of poker chips and rubbers. A man waking up from his blank slate, entering the room of his life. This is Stuart, this is the record. A tale of a man awoken to a past of regret and haunting memories, of taking love for granted by not understanding what was in front of him before it was too late. A desperate call to an old friend for drinks and dancing, invitation declined. Awoken to his own undoing, decisions made both conscious and unconscious. Never quite lucid, but everything vivid — the emotions, the memories, and the void where certain memories have faded. Did we spend our lives together? He can’t recall.

A fitting conclusion, “Like Only Lovers Can” rides a placid wave of organ, acoustic guitar and light percussion. “We can only hurt each other / the way that lovers can.” Stuart’s most frank unveiled statement of truth on the record. But where to go from here? Only one thing to do: put on your shoes and go laughing to the noose.

25 years in, 10 records deep, and The Waiting Room is a masterpiece of pure, uncompromising art. Works of elusive, strange poetry musing on the ultimate paradox of life. The suffering, the inevitably of mistakes and regrets and the sorrow of loss, nostalgia, and memories. But never, in any of this searching and, in this record in particular, admission, does Stuart’s maudlin disposition overcome him or the listener. He’s a second chance man. He’s a dreamer. And the gorgeous-jazz inflected arrangements, inspiring in their orchestral swell, keep this band unbound by genre. The music reflects all the complexities and nuances of life itself. There are many sounds. There are many moments. Sometimes we soar, sometimes we dip, and sometimes we get wrapped up in the gust of everything at once. And it’s beautiful. It’s your life. words / c depasquale

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