Tracks
Performer Notes
- Tindersticks: Stuart Staples (vocals, guitar); Neil Fraser (guitar); Dickon Hinchliffe (violin); David Boulter (keyboards); Mark Colwill (bass); Alistair Macaulay (drums).
- Remastered German version features a bonus CD of demos, plus extensive liner notes and new packaging.
- England's Tindersticks are often compared to the American group Lambchop, as both feature elegant, elaborate orchestrations, a low-key, often gloomy sensibility, and a mumbly vocalist. In contrast to their American peers' roots-identified sound, however, Tindersticks are more like 19th-Century romantics, with a distinctly European sense of decadence. Their debut album finds the Tindersticks sounding more like a conventional rock band than they ever would again.
- Though strings and horns provide some coloration, the orchestral aspect of the album is limited, and guitar-and-drum-based 4/4 rhythms abound. Still, the band's wonderfully obsessive morbidity and muted tones owe more to the John Cale side of the Velvet Underground than to anything remotely blues-derived. Singer Stuart Staples's often-indecipherable baritone murmur, which bears the influence of Nick Cave and Scott Walker, provides just the right amount of languid world-weariness for the Tindersticks' fragile vision.
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (12/29/94-1/12/95) - "...A swirl of guitars, violin, trumpet, vibe and bassoon, Tindersticks' nearly 80-minute debut is mood music of...[an] anxious variety....Their best tunes...glimmer like dreams."
Spin (12/94, p.81) - Listed as one of `Spin's Best Albums of '94' - "...plumbing the moody depths...that swings from spaghetti-western twangathons to sullen cabaret balladry....poignant, beautiful...menacing..."
Entertainment Weekly (6/17/94, p.52) - "...the white-knuckled confessional dirges achieve a haunting beauty..." - Rating: B
Q (1/94, p.102) - 3 Stars - Good
Q (p.141) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[A] strikingly maudlin six-piece capable of producing beautiful music..."
Melody Maker (1/1/94, p.76) - Ranked #1 in Melody Maker's list of the `Albums Of The Year' for 1993 - "...sprawling, ambitious, faltering, brilliant, romantic, spontaneous, spooky, flawed and delightful....a quiet, candlelit inventory of love sorrows..."
Melody Maker (10/9/93, p.38) - "...mystery, grace and a sense of place are here in abundance, and the band's collective imagination extends way beyond the race for a front cover in the music press...."
