Album Review: No Treasure But Hope by Tindersticks

There are few if any working bands who craft their music as meticulously as Tindersticks; their music is like a suspension bridge built out of nuance, a wealth of small details coming together into something tremendously powerful even when it's whisper quiet (which is often). So it's surprising to learn that the group's 2019 album No Treasure But Hope was recorded in less than a week. Rather than creating an elaborately constructed piece in the studio and then figuring out how to play it on-stage, in this case they opted to establish the framework of their compositions first, and then played them live in the studio for a more natural, organic feel.

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If it seems as if Tindersticks have been quiet on the studio albums front since 2016's The Waiting Room, that’s perhaps because front man Stuart A Staples has since released two albums of his own. First came 2018’s solo work Arrhythmia, followed by a continuation of his working relationship with Claire Denis, this time with the soundtrack to her science-fiction movie High Life. The band as a whole meanwhile released the soundtrack to Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F Percy Smith.

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Stuart A. Staples opens Tindersticks' latest album with a note on the nature of beauty, a subject they've been pursuing for nearly 30 years now. "For the beauty, give me something to ease," he sings delicately over Dan McKinna's mournful piano, which sounds suited to a funeral rather than a new beginning. "For it's the beauty that's got its claws in me." It's an invasive virus, one that overwhelms your body and soul, that elicits malignant symptoms.

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T he oddest thing on Tindersticks' 12th album is its longest track, See My Girls. Stuart Staples, a mannered singer anyway, sounds as if he has been studying Ron Moody playing Fagin in Oliver! And the lyric he delivers in that sly and insinuating voice is set in an unspecified past, in which cameras and newsstands are still everyday things. On the walls of his kiosk, the narrator has pinned the photos his girls have sent him from their travels - Paris, Rome, the Pyramids - via some very odd phrasing ("The tall buildings of the Americas / Skyscrapers as they are known." Skyscrapers, you say? Really?).

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