A Tindersticks Ticket

Experimenting again with this whole blogging thing. I once had one, off a music forum (yeah, I'm badly addicted to them), but I supposed having an actual one is not a bad idea either. So here we go again, I guess I should be talking about myself and stuff, but since I'm more interested in music than in sharing boring details about myself, we'll... skip to the end.

Today's main interest for me (besides having just started "la relâche" as we call it in French, hence being on vacation, which was way overdue) is having just found out, thanks to last.fm (shamefull publicity, I guess, but I live for this site these days), that Tindersticks will be in Montreal on March 9th, which is an amazing news, considering that I had never expected to see this band live here. Love that band. Love the vocals. I only discovered them last summer, and have since acquired three of their albums: Tindersticks, Tindersticks II, as well as the recent The Hungry Saw, which means that I have four more to go, darn it. I plan on acquiring Curtains in particular very soon.

Some of their songs are weaker, I'm sure, but how am I supposed not to love a band with such a lead vocalist? Stuart A. Staples could be reading a freaking fast-food menu board and I'd most likely still get turned on. I remember reading somewhere on youtube comments about him: first someone said that he sounded like Leonard Cohen had mated with Nick Cave, and someone replied that it was like Nick Cave had mated with God himself, which can't be too far from the truth considering that for me, the Holy Trinity of male vocalists is these three guys. I guess that makes me a bad Catholic or something.

Crap, I forgot Tom Waits in there. Oh well, Tom Waits will take on Hades role or something then, but we'll focus on Tom some other time. And come to think of it, I'm forgetting a bunch of lovely, breathtaking vocalists too (Steve Marriot, Arthur Brown and David Byron come to mind).

Anyway. So besides the vocals, Tindersticks have these very lush, quiet, anything but pop orchestrations with lots of strings and piano, as well as brass here in there, a perfect complement to their sweet, sad melodies that seem to cover all sort of loves and sins. They're rainy Sunday afternoon, cold sunny Monday morning music, and everything in between.

So I will be seeing them, and am mighty excited about it, despite my usual worries about new venues. But 31$ for a ticket is quite a bargain for a concert these days, and it's almost laughable to think that such a quality band sell tickets so cheap. That'll be a few days after having seen The Strawbs, by the way, something I plan to comment later on as well.