release date: Jun. 9, 1997
format: cd
[album rate: 4 / 5] [3,96]
producer: Tindersticks
label: This Way Up / PolyGram - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Another Night In" (5 / 5) - 2. "Rented Rooms" (4 / 5) (live) - 3. "Don't Look Down" - 6. "Ballad of Tindersticks" - 7. "Dancing" - 8. "Let's Pretend" (4,5 / 5) - 10. "Buried Bones" (4 / 5) - 12. "(Tonight) Are You Trying to Fall in Love Again" (4,5 / 5) - 13. "I Was Your Man" - 14. "Bathtime" - *16. "A Marriage Made in Heaven"
*Bonus on US-issue
3rd studio album by Tindersticks. Once again, the band delivers a really strong collection of compositions. The album title presumably refers to the art of acting, and that may also be found in many of the song lyrics. Two songs feature duets with actors, Ann Magnuson and Isabella Rosselini, or actually it only contains one song with Magnusson on the standard EU issue (track #10), but for some reason I was able to purchase a US-issue in Denmark, which also contains the unlisted track #16 featuring Rosselini.
I remember the album as a bit of a disappointment, which has to do with what I found the best about the debut. In my perspective, and from listening to "City Sickness" (from the debut album), Tindersticks was a band with obvious bonds to a post-punk style, but with their second album they had taken a different path and then this album is no return to what I thought they represented. Looking back over the years and the long list of albums and stylistic changes they have go been through, this album stands out as a corner stone, a marker point, where the band for the first time showed what their version of chamber pop was about, and that they were not bound to gothic rock but are much more than that. A few tracks on the first two albums carried some of the same jazzy tone and a quieter melancholic mourning that oozes throughout this one. This is one of their most harmonic and coherent albums. Two tracks are duets. The beautiful "Buried Bones" feature Ann Magnuson on vocals, and here it's obvious that she's not only an actor but is a skilled musician, and on the other hand there's "A Marriage Made in Heaven", a duet with actor Isabella Rosselini, which seems more like a [corny] gimmick too evidently displaying her not so gifted singing skills, and / or as a reference to the (epic) singing voice of Marilyn Monroe, but apart from that the album is highly recommendable and one of my favourites by the band.
I recall seing the band while touring with the album that Autumn - they played a great gig at Amager Bio, Copenhagen on Sep. 17 with Cornershop as warm-up band - and they were great too!
The cover art is credited Stuart Staples and his wife, Suzanne Osborne, who also contributed with a band portrait for the debut album.
[ allmusic.com 4,5 / 5 stars ]
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