Taken from the recently released album, Waiting for the Moon, new single ‘Sometimes It Hurts’ finds the crooning, treacle baritone of Stuart Staples lubricated by the equally oiled and moist, Lhasa De Sala – she of French-Canadian persuasion. Dour, anxious, morose, bleak and so painfully, painfully tender it could bleed at any moment, it’s everything that your average art-house loving chamber-goth would have wanted for Xmas.
Accompanied by a faintly amusing short film by Martin Wallace, the release pretty much dispels any inklings you had that Stuart and the boys were anything other than posturing romantics. Entitled ‘The Art Of Making Love’ – the film shows the happy couple – assuming the positions of – but never actually consummating – sex. It’s bizarre, daft and totally meaningless. But oddly enough – it still seems somehow right in this context.
Sweeping orchestration, cocktail lounge pianos – the Tindersticks are hardly furrowing new ground here but when catharsis tastes this sweet, who’s counting?