Album Review: No Treasure But Hope by Tindersticks

As autumn turns to winter, what better moment for a new album by those reliable chroniclers of early sunsets and after-dark woes, Tindersticks? Their first release in three years doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Rather, it reasserts the band’s commitment to chamber-pop melodies that descend like leaves falling from the trees, and to lyrics that brim with puddles of heartache.

Stuart Staples and his ragged troupe have maintained a deeply affecting holding pattern through their many decades at the frontline of melancholy pop. Here, they begin as they mean to continue with the willowy ‘For The Beauty’, where Staples sings in the fashion of someone who’s just woken up covered in streamers, slowly realising the party ended hours ago. The sensibility continues through ‘The Amputees’ and the lissom ‘Take Care In Your Dreams’, which, with its delicate orchestral flutter, harks back to the band’s bruised mid-’90s output.

No Treasure But Hope was assembled in a relatively speedy five weeks and represents a departure from the months of painstaking graft and tweaking that has characterised the band’s previous several LPs. However, it is no rush job. Instead, the album unfolds with stately intensity. Yes, this is in many ways just another Tindersticks record. But since when has that not been something to quietly celebrate?

Out now.