Tindersticks, March 4, World Cafe Live

POSTED: Thursday, March 5, 2009, 6:00 PM

Filed Under: Music | Show Last Night

Photos | K. Ross Hoffman

Bless the lowly sound man. His burdens are great.

Tindersticks are masters of the slow burn. They play hushed, snail-paced, late-night numbers that swell softly, almost imperceptibly, to peaks of smoldering pathos. It's music of restraint and artless sophistication, but it's nonetheless the stuff of high melodrama. At the World Cafe last night, as the Nottingham, England band kicked off a rare U.S. tour with their first-ever Philadelphia date, their performance was marked by a slightly unsettling note of minor personal drama which seemed at times to fuel, and at other times to damp, the band's subtle fire.

Stuart Staples was not having a great night. The steely-eyed vocalist, whose unmistakable baritone ' rich and intoxicating but also weirdly, disarmingly austere, fluttering in an unearthly quaver on his sustained notes ' is the band's single most distinctive characteristic, was visibly ticked off. You would hardly have noticed it from his vocal performance, which was as ineffably silken as ever, but the gaps between songs rarely passed without a quick scowl or some off-handed sarcastic muttering directed at the sound techs, often prompted by painful-sounding static pops. (Evidently there was some problem with his cordless in-ear monitor system, though it didn't seem to be having any noticeable effect on the music.) His gruff, patronizingly-worded instructions to the lighting-board operator ('turn down those white lights and make this stage feel less like a bathroom') made a sharp contrast to girlish opener Dawn Landes' demure request to turn on the disco-ball so she could sing a love song. At one point he seemed to storm into the wings as if about to give an earful to some poor technician (the pointy-sideburned, imposing-statured Staples is not a man you want to cross), though it turned out he was simply clearing the stage for the brief trio instrumental 'The Organist Entertains.'

By the end of the set he started to loosen up, finally acknowledging the audience directly and even cracking a smile, but for most of the night he seemed caught up in his own distraction and annoyance, projecting a tension quite incongruous with the fluidity of the music, though perhaps he was able to channel that frustration into the typically underhanded intensity of his singing.

As I say though, it was a minor issue. The band are nearly twenty-year veterans (though only three of the long-running original sextet are still around), far too polished and mature to let something like this mar or disrupt their exquisite music-making. (In fact, the incongruity of Staples' mood simply pointed up the fact of their undeniable professionalism.) The seven nattily-dressed band-members, including a cellist/saxist and a trumpeter/maracaman, worked their way through a subdued but satisfying set that drew mostly (and mostly in sequence) from last year's album The Hungry Saw, with a couple of welcome throwbacks: the impassioned 'Dying Slowly' and largely spoken-word 'No Man in the World,' from 2001's soul-drenched high-water-mark Can Our Love', and 'Say Goodbye to the City' and 'My Oblivion' from 2003's Waiting For The Moon.

The crowd, though polite, were clearly quite pleased. And ultimately, I think the band warmed to their Philadelphia welcome. Who knows when Tindersticks will pass this way again ' with any luck it won't take another twenty years for them to come back around ' but let's hope we can have all the technical kinks worked out by then.

Posted by K. Ross Hoffman @ 6:00 PM Permalink | Post a comment

Previous Story: USELESS LOST RECAPS: "316"

Next Story: They Might Be Giants, "Crumb Factory"

Comments (0)

What we're trying to do this weekend
CONCERT REVIEW: The Postal Service @ The Mann 6/17
CONCERT REVIEW: The Rolling Stones @ Wells Fargo Center 6/18 || Ian McLagan @ Tin Angel 6/17
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Sunny, Tony and the return of Do No Harm
Behind the scenes of local film A Man Full of Trouble
NOW SEE THIS: Salinger film trailer
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Indian fare rules, Dunder Mifflin lives on, Tom Jones is a god
REVIEW: Archer Live! @ the TLA 1/11
CITY PAPER WRITING CONTEST 2013: Send stories! Send poetry!
CONCERT PHOTOS: The National/Dirty Projectors @ The Mann Center 6/7

About this blog

Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

Follow Critical Mass editors Patrick Rapa and Emily Guendelsberger on Twitter:

@mission2denmark | @emilygee

Search this blog:

Topics:

Blog archives:

June
May
April

March
February
January

Past Archives: