Tindersticks: Soft Tissue review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

(City Slang)
From 70s soul to glowing strings, the cult outfit continue to illuminate the fringes of pop music, celebrating the beauty in small things

It’s easy to see the initial part of Tindersticks’ career as a missed opportunity. There was a brief moment, around the time of their eponymous 1995 album and its successor Curtains, where it looked as if the Nottingham band’s lushly orchestrated, emotive songs might find a wide audience: the former briefly reached the Top 20, the latter propelled them to a major label deal. But they were doomed to remain a critically acclaimed cult concern, bigger in continental Europe than at home. They were a band that remained slightly out of step, too twilit and idiosyncratic for an era when British alternative rock tended to brash primary colours and singalong commerciality, their image too down-at-heel and their mood too downcast, their music more suited to soundtracking the demanding films of French director Claire Denis than the goal roundup on Match of the Day.

Yet there is a sense that cult status has served them well in their second act. Tindersticks reappeared in 2008 after a five-year hiatus and devoid of half of the original members. Most bands who reform, whether they would admit it or not, are in thrall to nostalgia and the expectations that come with it: their new material at best a fair forgery of old albums everyone knows, there to fill space in the setlist between the huge hits everyone has paid to hear. But the rejuvenated Tindersticks weren’t hemmed in by their own past or powered by the need to revisit former commercial glories. They’ve spent the last 16 years quietly pushing forward and making hugely impressive albums, their remarkable qualitative consistency spiked by the fact that they’re sure enough of their audience to throw them the occasional curveball, as on 2021’s Distractions: made remotely during lockdown, it dealt in samples, loops and bursts of noise and featured arrangements so sparse that the music behind frontman Stuart Staples’ voice occasionally seemed to be barely there at all.

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