Tindersticks

Following the release of their new and eagerly-awaited album, “The Waiting Room”, Tinderstick’s musical journey will be bringing the deeply poetic group to Athens to play two concerts on the Onassis Stegi’s Main Stage. The audience will be seated in accordance with the concept of the tour, which will take the band to emblematic European theatres including the Volksbühne, Le Bouffes du Nord and the Barbican.

Tindersticks’ 1993 debut album cocked a snook at every received truth of the then all-powerful Britpop scene. The album’s proverbial length, but even more so the personal nature of its songs plus the easy co-existence of so many well-assimilated influences in such a grand but unforced whole, ensured Tindersticks’ immediate entry into the select club of performers whom listeners and critics either adore or despise.

Ten albums and more than twenty years later, the band—down to five members now—is still carving out unique and timeless songs which deal with ephemera but, by constantly renewing themselves, retain their ability to hone in on their listeners’ emotions. With elements of soul, jazz, lounge and new classical broadening their musical palette and Fender electric piano, Hammond organ, glockenspiel, vibraphone and string and wind ensembles to serve the organic quality of their sound, the heartfelt performances of the nasal bard Stuart Staples transform every lyric into a de profundis truth.

In Tindersticks’ case, sadness and elation are anything but mutually exclusive. Carefully thought-out orchestrations, noir atmospheres and sensuous timbres give their songs a lightness of touch that steers them clear of the overwrought and allows vistas of gorgeous imagery to unfold before the listener’s inner eye.