Tindersticks

That strange new sound you hear in Stuart Staples’ voice – mingling with his world’s-worth of weariness, his unbearable heaviness of being – is the sound of hope.

If, over the last decade, Tindersticks have supplied the soundtrack for the bloodiest extremes of the human condition – their Morricone/Barry anguish-scapes and Stuart Staples’ dolorous baritone bringing us to both the ugliest places and the most beautiful – then Staples has himself been its flawed protagonist, the everyman who, despite a good heart and the best intentions, cannot help but kill the thing he loves. Tonight, ten years later, in a soulful mood and prettily string-laden, Tindersticks are something else entirely: it could be that they’re in stunning top form, or this could be merely the sound of uncomplicated joy, the possibility of a happy ending revealing itself after all.

Can Our Love’s languid grooves and redemption songs – the rapturous ‘Dying Slowly’, the loveblind slow-dance of ‘Can Our Love’ – are the evening’s (dazzling, ecstatic) centrepieces; but the older songs also benefit from this recent soul transfusion. The pained helplessness of ‘A Night In’ still breaks your heart anew, drawing fresh blood; the dusty love-legend of ‘Kathleen’ still rivals Dirty Three for ominous, bloody-minded portent and ‘She’s Gone’ is a waltz of despair, of bereavement, a song you sing to yourself to still the noise of an empty house.

As usual, Stuart – lost, rapturous, ecstatic – is electrifying, a soul singer with or without their current Stax-ophilia; but tonight, Dickon Hinchcliffe - for years a careful, slow-burning stunner on violin – is, as a singer, a revelation. He’s a foil we couldn’t have abided in the early days, when any second voice would have been a distraction from the central drama of one man versus his own daemons. Tonight, it’s magnificent: Dickon’s plain, still whisper a perfect contrast to Stuart’s wracked, messily human soul-mining, as if he’s another version of Staples himself, a secret voice, a better man.

Absolutely staggering.