release date: Jun. 17, 2003
format: cd
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,42]
producer: Stuart Staples & Ian Caple
label: Beggars Banquet - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Until the Morning Comes" - 2. "Say Goodbye to the City" - 4. "4.48 Psychosis" - 6. "Trying to Find a Home" - 7. "Sometimes It Hurts" (feat. Lhasa de Sela) - 8. "My Oblivion" (live)
6th studio album by Tindersticks following two years after Can Our Love... is like the predecessor produced by songwriter and vocalist Stuart Staples and Ian Caple - with the latter also co-producing the band's first two albums.
The album marks a clear stylistic change, where the releases from the second to the fifth album share much of the same musical settings and have roughly the same tempo. Waiting for the Moon, on the other hand, is more strictly a chamber pop release, where the arrangements are carry bolder use of strings and wind instruments.
The album was generally met by lukewarm reviews, and it wasn't really what I had hoped for neither. I tried to listen it, tried to be open to the new set of songs but they never really unfolded. It wasn't long before I had to realize that this was an immediate 'misfire' or if nothing else, the band's thinnest outing to date. I couldn't help thinking that the band was in a lack of inspiration, that with no new ideas they had turned on autopilot and were satisfied going through the motions adding new arrangements to outtakes without much success.
Apparently, the studio recordings for the album were not the easiest process with internal conflicts that the following years accumulated and ultimately led to a major change in the group's line-up.
After this, one of the band's founders, composer and violinist, Dickon Hinchcliffe recorded the soundtrack album for the movie "Forty Shades of Blue" (2005), and lead vocalist Stuart Staples followed in his footsteps by releasing his first solo album, Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04 (2005) and already the following year he released the solo follow-up Leaving Songs (2006), which (may / may not) have heralded the end to Tindersticks as a band. They played a one-off gig at London's Barbican Centre, performing the band's second full-length studio album and shortly afterwards three of the original members left Tindersticks: Dickon Hincliffe, bassist Mark Colwill, and drummer Alistair Macaulay, and Tindersticks were effectively reduced to a trio. Or that is the very simplified explanation for the band's major 'remodeling'. Another and longer explanation tells the story of lead singer Stuart Staples' ambiguous signals that may indicate he harbored desires to go solo with his 2006 album Leaving Songs. The album contains the following notes from Staples' hand: "These are songs written on the verge of leaving the things I loved and stepping into a new unknown life, both musically and personally. I was always aware that these songs were the end of something, a kind of closing a circle of a way of writing that I started so long ago and I knew I had to move on from."
Fortunately, Tindersticks and Staples didn't end the circle here, but Tindersticks in a 'Mark II' version was soon to rise from the ashes as another bird Phoenix.
The front cover is from a painting by Staples' wife, Suzanne Osborne.
[ allmusic.com 3 / 5 stars ]
