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Album Review
by SashaS
22-7-2005
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| Stuart A. Staples: not an ordinary peep |
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Stuart A. Staples: 'Lucky Dog Recordings '03-'04'
(Beggars Banquet)
Stuart A. Staples: Tindersticks’ man spins solo magic!
Tindersticks frontman Stuart A. Staples’s solo album ‘Lucky Dog Recordings '03-'04’ is a collection of songs that really takes you places - darker, more emotional and deeper, sometime starker - than the band.
‘Somerset House’ opens with such minimalism of vocally lead sounds that are suddenly adorned with a trumpet that simply transforms it into music from Heaven. ‘Marseilles Sunshine’ is easier to recognize as a familiar tune to Tindersticks’ oeuvre but it is not a copy and that piano tinkles like a wizard’s keyboard.
The story of quality continues with greater élan on ‘Say Something Now’, while ‘Friday Night’ takes us into that realm where the voice fills in the whole vista. Commanding onlooker/listener attention [and faith] this album provides a lot of magic but avoiding the obvious. This is not a solo album per se, there are guests, the tracks work the best when the man is alone, just like coming up with songs at 3am - such as ‘Dark Days’.
Even when tracks are given more dramatic orchestration - check mutated blues of ‘Shame On You’ - it is with restraint and elegance but still spellbinding. When you think he can’t better it any more you get ‘People Fall Down’, probably a pivotal song here!
The tracks ‘Say Something Now’ and ‘Friday Night’ were released as a limited edition 7" single on Staples’s own Lucky Dog Recordings label and made available as a download single through Beggars Banquet from the 20th June.
At the time when it is bloody dangerous to live in London, Stuart A. Staples provides an escape from it all, from the bullshit of religion, misguided politicos and concrete terror where we all pretend “We are United” and “It will NOT change our way of life!” but even the atheists have started praying!
Staples’s album is like oasis in the maddening world where your precious life can be put out as easily as a candle’s flame because some idiot doesn’t give a toss about own existence.
‘Lucky Dog’ makes me feel like getting out my Union Jack flag and waving it at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford street in defiance of the dumb, the ignorant and the poison-minded!
Vive la vie!
[However depressing!]
9/10
SashaS
22-7-2005
Stuart A. Staples’s album ‘Lucky Dog Recordings ‘03-04’ was released on 11 July by Beggars Banquet
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