Tindersticks: Can Our Love... : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Tindersticks' Stuart Staples is one cafe-poet crooner who redeems his pretensions with his crushed-velvet cummerbund of a voice; over his sextet's acoustic brooding, he makes love to his torments like Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed or maybe Neil Diamond at some nightmarish gin palace where they have an after-midnight special on absinthe refills. The tastefully melancholic gentleman songsters of Tindersticks have courted their muse for nearly ten years now - check out 1997's Curtains, or the 1995 single where Staples turns Pavement's "Here" into a fantastic cabaret ballad. On Can Our Love . . ., Tindersticks get heavily into Seventies soul, which expands their sound with more depth than ever before. As usual, the best songs take their time, as in the nine-minute "Sweet Release." But the killer is the seven-minute two-chord epic "Chilitetime," which grooves along as Staples weaves a magnificent spell that not even an angry violin solo can break. It's the sound of Tindersticks at top strength.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 872 - July 5, 2001)