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Live Review
by SashaS
31-10-2003
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| Stuart Staples, Tindersticks & viva ache |
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Live: Tindersticks
Hammersmith Apollo, London
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Tindersticks: misty notes from Z46
The idea was to see this show just for the pure enjoyment of quality music and no review was planned. But then, it turned out to be so good that we couldn’t prevent ourselves writing notes while occupying seat Z46. It was dim, gloomy, melancholic and yet so uplifting and liberating! At times, it felt like some secret of the universe could just pop open… It didn’t but one neither woke up atop K2…
Life is a graveyard of used up emotions… Tindersticks offer songs to soundtrack rain-line crying, autumnal harvesting before joy ends… Their melodies are as huge as Empire State Building, providing complete oblivion through music, these tracks cure all the asylum-from-emo-trouble seekers… Elegant compositions, often as fragile as infatuation, cool-as-icicles presentation, so much class in the tunes to supply soul-food for a couple of years, or to replace ‘issues’ a quartet of other bands [and we are talking Elbow, Travis, Doves, even Coldplay kind] combined can’t cook up. Pathos, these upstarts can’t spell it!
Tunes for wounded souls, thus – the entire planet. For the future lost loves, the sensation-fools, agony and xtc of life, the lonely night’s listening. It, as if by some magic, mends sorrows, patches up broken hearts and underscores that nagging chest-pain. Stuart Staples led band knows how to address suffering with dignity, from a proud stoic’s position of anguished beauty-ists.
Songs emit from six’s instruments like liquid gems, crisscrossing the band’s past material with ‘Waiting For The Moon’ selection of six months ago: ‘4:48 Psychosis’, ‘My Oblivion’, ‘Running Wild’, then ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’, ‘Say Goodbye To The City’, ‘Talk To Me’, ‘Raindrops’, ‘Jism’… Long before the two sets of encores I stopped taking notes, switched off compass and completely got lost in this forest of tones!
Life’s not a competition but a search for certain truths and occasional moments of elation. This show won the argument for the latter. Sheer panache – although a bit strange to be sitting down in a venue where several gigs have already been standing-only – that’s what tonight show was. In the end, being so emotionally drained, I find a solace in a nearby hostelry to procure quite a few… Anyway, don’t recall how I got to be here writing this, gov!
A plea for your souls: people, there is so much good music out there it is a bloody crime consuming the aural fluff such as ‘Crap Idol’ and Fake Academy’, or any manufactured acts, be it Liberty X, Blink 182 or contrived like Marilyn Manson; it ain’t worth you wasting your readies on Madonna, Kylie, Britney, Beyoncé… because the babe-witches only sell sex-appeal, a fictitious trait, a visual lie. Tindersticks know the real life…
They are the twilight swingers… Or, the witchin’ hour guardians of sentimental apocalypses.
SashaS
31-10-2003
Tindersticks EP ‘My Oblivion’ has been released on 13 October 2003 by Beggars Banquet
Tindersticks album ‘Waiting For The Moon’ is available via the same label
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