Trouble Every Day

Never ones to shy away from their own unwavering path, the second Tindersticks' album this year, sees them score the soundtrack to Claire Denis' controversial art-house film Trouble Every Day, in which Beatrice Dalle seduces and cannibalises her way through four men. Tindersticks and Denis have viewed each other with a long-held mutual admiration, and this is their second collaboration following their soundtrack to the 1996 film Nenette Et Boni. Like that album, the music here veers away on the whole, from their ennui-laced, melancholic vignettes. Instead, the songs are sparse, stripped-down affairs suggesting a haunting and dislocated mood made all the more eerily poignant when imagining the film's horrific scenes of carnage. Strings are half-plucked and remain motionless in the air for a few seconds, horns tremulously sound, creating somnambulist and elegiac fragments of songs. While fans may miss singer Stuart Staples' trademark Walker-esque croon or the lush, rich arrangements of classic Tindersticks' songs, Trouble Every Day is nonetheless an affecting album, which demonstrates a brooding, understated intensity. The album's title and only vocal track, is a riposte to the album's nakedness, with the sweep of the strings and Staples' voice producing a melancholic yet life-affirming warmth. --Suzannah Brown

Label: Unknown
Studio: Beggars Banquet
Released: 2001-10-01
Format: Audio CD

Extras/Features:
Soundtrack