5 GREAT ALBUM TRACKS FOR FRIDAY (Part 21)

Back at the beginning of January, I took a wee break from this series and instead highlighted 5 great non-album tracks by Tindersticks and said I'd get round to featuring my favourite 5 non-single album tracks.

OK, so it's taken a while. And the reason is partly that the series itself stopped as I took a break from blogging and then found it difficult to get right back in the saddle again.  But it is also the fact that I simply cannot narrow it down today.  No matter how hard I try.

And so what I've had to do is break it up into three parts.  There will be five tracks from each of the first two LPs and then another five from the remaining LPs.  I know it's a cop-out.  But I really cannot do justice to their work without having it in three parts.  I'm sitting here with 15 tracks written down in front of me and I just cannot cut them down to five.

I know all too well that Tindersticks are a band who you either get or don't get, and subsequently you either love or loath.  If you do love them, then you will hopefully have some empathy with me today.  I'm not saying everything they've released is fantastic - indeed I've been a bit disappointed with a few things, especially since Mark Two of the band came into being a few years back - but what I do find is that they are an act where it is best to decide to listen to an album in its entirety rather than skip through tracks.  And I rarely have them on shuffle on the i-pod as other than my all-time favourite LP track and a couple of the singles, I don't like to listen to their stuff in isolation.

There have been 8 studio LPs in all from the self-titled debut of 1993 through to Falling Down A Mountain in 2010.  It's from that self-titled LP that these five bits of musical magnificence come today:-

mp3 : Tindersticks - Milky Teeth
mp3 : Tindersticks - Jism
mp3 : Tindersticks - Raindrops
mp3 : Tindersticks - Her
mp3 : Tindersticks - Drunk Tank

The album was named Record of the Year by the music paper Melody Maker.  It was hugely acclaimed critically but slow to be picked up on by the record-buying public only reaching #56 in the charts on its release.  But it will be one of those records that has sold way way more in the years since its release than it did when it first hit the shops.

It has 22 tracks in all on four sides on vinyl (21 tracks only on the CD as the running time was too long for it to fit on a standard length CD).  And barely a second of time is wasted.  In naming it album of the year, the UK weekly paper Melody Maker summed it up better than I ever could:-

Tindersticks is sprawling, ambitious, faltering, brilliant, romantic, spontaneous, spooky, flawed and delightful.

And even more impressively was the fact they were magnificent when they played live, whether as a six-piece or supplemented by a horn section or on the odd occasion by a full-blown string section (which really was something to see and hear).

At least 12 of the non-single tracks from the debut could have made it today.  Jism was always a certainty as it remains my favourite bit of music the band have ever recorded.....the others only made the cut after a lot of soul-searching. 

And to show just how extraordinary good this lot were, here's some live or BBC session versions of some of them as well along with the original older version of Milky Teeth:-

mp3 : Tindersticks - Milky Teeth (original version)
mp3 : Tindersticks - Jism (live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, March 1995)
mp3 : Tindersticks - Raindrops (live at the Coliseu dos Recreios de Lisboa, October 2001)
mp3 : Tindersticks - Her (Mark Radcliffe Show, BBC Radio 1, February 1997)
mp3 : Tindersticks - Drunk Tank (John Peel Show, BBC Radio 1, April 1993)

Happy Listening