release date: Sep. 20, 2014
format: digital
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,54]
producer: Stuart A. Staples
label: Lucky Dog / City Slang - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Room 1 - Whispering Guns Parts 1, 2 and 3" - 5. "Room 3 - Sunset Glow"
Soundtrack album - or that's how it's often referred to, although it's perhaps more of a 'soundscape'. At least that's what a sticker on the album reads: "Soundscapes From The In Flanders Fields World War I Museum In Ypres, Belgium", i.e. "Soundscapes from the 'In Flanders Fields Museum' in Ypres, Belgium" for its permanent exhibition about World War I. In connection with the 100th memorial of the start of the war, Tindersticks apparently received a request from the museum to create the 'soundscapes' (or a sound collage) for a permanent exhibition. The music is purely instrumental and is credited Stuart Staples and Dan McKinna in collaboration.
The individual compositions may be hard to separate from one another - partly because their function is to act as sound collage for an exhibition space and thus is required to be played in infinite loops. Much in concordance to the music the band has composed for films by Claire Denis, the music differs significantly from the band's regular studio albums, while at the same time it carries a mark of having a close bond to a visual side that is hard to imagine. Still, Ypres is a different dark, insistent and rather gloomy collage, which with its locked-in mood fades out like an unsettling obscurity - something that might precisely underpin an exhibition about the horrors of war. The album appears as a more complete work than other of the band's soundtracks. It's rich in strings and reminiscent of outright Medieval times mixed with elements of post-rock. They are mostly slow compositions that beautifully unfold their wings and almost wraps up the listener in an intense mood saturated with the strongest emotions. In many ways it's a most distinctive work - also for Tindersticks, who shows itself here in a completely new and quite exciting territory.
