Mention Tindersticks to this reviewer and two mental images are conjured. The first is of a young Condron, holed up in his bedroom doing G.C.S.E coursework on a week night waiting to hear the new single by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci on The Evening Session but instead being force-fed some dreary alt.country-bollocks by Tindersticks. The second is of Vic Reeves doing his ‘pub singer’ impression on ‘Shooting Stars’ and sounding exactly like – yep – Tindersticks. As you may by now have worked out, Stuart A. Staples’ band didn’t really excite this then fresh-faced youth.
Ah yes, it was nice to be fresh-faced, but it’s even nicer to now be able to look Mr Staples in the brighter light of having listened to fellow miserable sods Reed, Cash and Cave and to finally get it. As the title suggests, ‘Leaving Songs’ marks the ending of a chapter for Staples or, as he puts so intriguingly in his own words, "a kind of closing a circle of a way of writing that I started so long ago and I knew I had to move on from". Why he’d want to move on from here is anyone’s guess, as this is an effortlessly poetic album.
Recorded in Nashville, there is an inescapably southern American sound that inflects tracks such as the lilting ‘This Old Town’, the duet with Maria McKee ‘This Road Is Long’ and the skeletal ‘Dance With An Old Man’. But there’s also a bit of Gainsbourg lurking in the plucked ‘Already Gone’, the brass-swathed cycles of ‘Goodbye To Old Friends’ and the duet with Lhasa de Sela ‘That Leaving Feeling’. Oh, and look at the song titles – not hard to see where the album title come from is it! Is it possible to apply the term concept album something so understated?
The album finishes with the gentle, Drake-like ebb of ‘Pulling In To The Sea’, the lyrical imagery of which depicts the leaving of one shore for another, though for now it remains a mystery to where he’s headed. And that’s ‘Leaving Songs’ for you: open-ended yet self-contained, full of symbolism yet clearly expressive. And so, to Steve Lamacq, this reviewer apologises: sorry for not listening.
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