Can Our Love

Ten years ago, on the Tindersticks’ amazing debut, Stuart Staples sang, “What we’ve got here/Is a tired love”. After four albums proper plus a handful of live keepsakes, b-sides collections, film scores and what have you, that love still sounds tired on the opening ‘Dying Slowly’. Crucially though, the band don’t.

A lot of new ground was broken on last year’s Simple Pleasure, with Tindersticks adopting the personality and warmth of soft-shoe soul and old school r&b. And here, for the most part, Staples sounds less like a soused Tim Hardin than ever – in fact, by ‘People Keep Comin’ Around’, things have gotten positively funky. An unaffected, natural-born soul croon takes centre stage, supported by muted horns, Hayes-y strings, vintage electric piano and measured time-marking from the rhythm section – the overall effect is not unlike Lambchop goes to London.

The arrangements remain just as ornate (take a bow Dickon Hinchliffe for the strings and brass charts, please), and all the action still takes place long after midnight, as the smoke rings curlicue around an insomniac radio and the holy drinkers’ hour comes a creeping.

On ‘Sweet Release’ for example, the ensemble get to divulge some of their most secret night visions. “Gimme that sweet release,” moans slowhand Staples over nearly nine minutes of foreplay involving some erogenous violin action – a professional luvverman on weekend leave from chronic depression. Elsewhere, ‘No Man In The World’ finds him, once again, at the end of the affair, beating himself blue over the futility of it all, “Sitting in the garden watching our house burn/Knowing I couldn’t help it”. It’s a dismal (for him), yet not uncomforting (for us) episode.

Can Our Love… is an album that leaves you feeling empty – not emptied out, but ready to be filled up. As ever, Tindersticks specialise in the slow burn, but you can still warm your hands off it.