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Jan 20, 2016The combination of rich layered instrumentation, carefully orchestrated strings and Stuart Staples' evocative vocals give feelings of loss and loneliness a cinematic grandeur, yet their consistently strong recordings never lapse into sentimental excess. That is a balancing act few can manage, and the group pull it off yet again here.
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Jan 19, 2016The Waiting Room already feels like Tindersticks’ strongest and most adventurous release since the hiatus.
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Jan 22, 2016Though Tindersticks is no longer angling for the pure dramatic sweep of its ambitious ’90s records, it remains a unique band, maintaining a sense of creativity (and making beautiful music) while working within limited themes.
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Feb 29, 2016Imperfections define personality and The Waiting Room wears its flaws well. Don’t let them put you off. This is a rich, warm, comfort blanket of a record, marbled with veins of darkness and light.
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Feb 10, 2016In some ways The Waiting Room is remarkable for hitting a number of classic Tindersticks checkmarks without ever feeling like it’s, well, going down a list checking them off.
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Feb 10, 2016This is a band freed from the need to look back. Which is not to say that The Waiting Room does not contain familiar and beloved elements of the band’s sonic history.
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Jan 27, 2016While many of the songs are gloomy as ever they are not cynical or nihilistic in their view of love or other subjects. Nor are they especially sentimental.
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Jan 26, 2016The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain.
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Jan 22, 2016The Waiting Room is another immensely satisfying collection from a band always able--even after personnel upheavals--to explore multiple styles while remaining ineffably themselves.
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Jan 21, 2016The Waiting Room is not an album which needs adornments: there is a simple, traditional pleasure in its earthy, untampered warmth--it is an album to be ingested in one sitting.
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Jan 20, 2016Now in their third decade the song remains the same, but on The Waiting Room Tindersticks still sound so out of time that ironically their music feels neither dated nor futuristic, it just is.
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Jan 19, 2016As ever with this band, it’s sure to be an idiosyncratic but beguiling direction, although there’s no hurry with so much to pick over on this thoughtful latest outing.
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Jan 14, 2016The Waiting Room is Tindersticks on ravishing form. For die-hards and newcomers alike, it's hard not to be drawn in by the lush facade it creates.
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MojoJan 11, 2016Never just black and white, nor blatantly "cinematic," it operates in subtle shades of grey and sepia, flushing with urgent instrumental colour when the internal simmering becomes too much. [Feb 2016, p.94]
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UncutJan 11, 2016A set of songs that inscribe their intensities and their romantic visions directly on the listener's heart. [Feb 2016, p.76]
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Q MagazineJan 11, 2016If you've skipped some of their more recent efforts, you'll be shocked by just how innovative and impressive they've become. [Feb 2016, p.119]
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Jan 11, 2016While The Waiting Room is not Tindersticks’ greatest album, it might be the one that best signifies how this project is an ongoing one, that the sum of all the band’s work is greater than any individual passages. That they’re playing the long game; waiting.
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Jan 27, 2016While The Waiting Room is a mixed bag, it's far more relaxed and sure of itself than Across Six More Leap Years was.
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Jan 21, 2016As the album unfolds, it proves to be much closer in tone to the lead-off theme than their looser detour. It's hard to find a band more moving at exploring longing, loss, and despair than Tindersticks, and The Waiting Room is such a vehicle.
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Jan 22, 2016The Waiting Room is reserved and considered, yet you still come out of the other end feeling like you’ve run the emotional gamut; in that respect, at least, you have to recognise it as Staples’ strongest set of songs for a good long while.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 23
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Mixed: 4 out of 23
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Negative: 2 out of 23
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Feb 1, 2016