FRANCE has done well by Stuart Staples. Not only has the Nottingham-born singer relocated to Limousin, built himself a studio and continued to provide soundtrack music for the films of director Claire Denis; the whiff of café noir also seems to have cleared his head when it comes to the future of his band, Tindersticks. Stripped back to three original members - Staples, keyboardist David Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser - they're in a less melancholic frame of mind for this, their first album in five years.

The piano tinkles and xylophone chimes of Introduction set an intimate mood from the start, and it's the quieter moments - particularly the piano and cello waltz of Come Feel The Sun - that now place the band on firmer, more accessible ground. Much as we all swooned, back in the day, to the orchestral romanticism of Tiny Tears, the time is right for a set of Tindersticks songs that aren't overlong or overblown.

Title track and current single The Hungry Saw, with its hustling backdrop of hand-shaken percussion, is unexpectedly upbeat given the grand guignol nature of the lyrics ("The first cut is the skin/The second is the muscle/Then there's a crack of bone/And he's at your heart").

A couple of instrumental tracks, E-Type and The Organist Entertains, could be set beneath images of faded fairground carousels on an empty beach, à la Betty Blue, but, nice as they are, they're fairly superfluous given that the "proper" songs here have atmosphere to spare.

The near-classic crescendo of Boobar Come Back To Me, picking up instruments along the way, stumbles when the whitest-ever doo-wop backing chorus steps in behind the lead vocals, but The Turns We Took brings the album to a fitting close, painting on a wider canvas and finding a role for Wichita Lineman-style string arrangements.

Staples's baritone voice remains Tindersticks' most potent weapon; perched on a bar stool, it caresses your speakers, one part seductive to two parts louche. He's the long-lost son that Brian Ferry and Ian Curtis never had.

Despite his French sojourn, Staples hasn't really been away during his band's five-year hiatus, having released two solo albums in the meantime. However, he has had to contend with the rise of Richard Hawley as the thinking man's crooner-du-jour and the reappearance of the original old-timer, Leonard Cohen, with live dates later this year. Then there's the fact that any new album that references Scott Walker and 1960s retro-European balladry is going to be dwarfed by The Last Shadow Puppets' number one opus, The Age Of The Understatement.

Nevertheless, like Elbow - another British band carried through years of silence by a cult following and a sheer bloody-mindedness to do their own thing - Tindersticks have chosen 2008 as the date to reclaim a place among the music industry's upstarts and debutants. Vive la difference, as they say down Staples's way.

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