Tindersticks - Can Our Love

When sizing up the appeal of Can Our Love…, the fifth album from the decade-old Tindersticks, the number of their records you may already own is largely irrelevant. The unswerving continuity of their work–chiefly remarkable for single-digit BPMs, a bone-dry sense of humor, and a luxuriant air of romantic desolation–suggests that each Tindersticks album is merely a small corner of a canvas the size of, well, life and love and loss. And on this album, once again we get what we came to swoon for: the dusty Hazlewood-esque intro prefacing Stuart Staples's forlorn, chocolaty mumbles ("dying slowly seems better than shooting myself") on "Don't Ever Get Tired," the interwoven vocal lines of "Chilitetime," and the intimate, Cohen-like voiceover of "No Man in the World." And we also get the suspicion, on hearing the Hammond-shivering, Bobby Womack-drifting-through-molasses seduction of "People Keep Comin' Around" and "Sweet Release," that if the Tindersticks have shifted position at all in the last 10 years, they have begun a slow, elegant sidle toward the spot marked "England's greatest soul band."