The collective around Stuart A. Staples is always good for surprises - be it with cover versions, soundtracks, solo and side projects or bold stylistic lunges. This is also the case on their 13th album "Distractions", on which the Brits try their hand at pieces by Neil Young, the Television Personalities and Dory Previn, but also at French chansons and a concentrated load of Krautrock. Why, why, why - eclipsed asked.
eclipsed: Is "Distractions" what the title implies: a little pastime during the lockdown?
Stuart A. Staples: There's something about it. Because at times like this you just have to block out reality because it can be so depressing and you can't let it take you over. When this window of opportunity opened up in the last few months, I used it to implement some ideas that I'd been carrying around for a while. So the album was a way to dream a little bit again, have fun and distract myself
Granted: The British are already a strange bunch - for 24 years now and ten albums they have been sounding out all areas of cultivated, well-tempered pop music, rejecting the common commercial thinking of the music industry and changing their line-up just as often as their record companies - namely after almost every album/tour cycle. While at the beginning of this decade they had been exclusively concerned with instrumental soundtracks and commissioned works for museums, they are now presenting a new recording called "The Waiting Room", the history of which mastermind Stuart Staples comments as follows: "It was important to try out a few new things. But if we also had ideas for the band, then we also worked on it. It's like, "Let's sound this out. At the end of 2014 we had a bunch of semi-finished songs that we found interesting. So we said to ourselves: 'Maybe we should summarize them on one album'."
The Tindersticks have never made a bad record before. But this new masterpiece of deliberately placed restraint represents a climax even on the crest hike of the British rock aristocrats. God knows that they sing ballads is not a sensation, because the band around singer Stuart A. Staples has always done that. But never before have they played so confidently with silence.
