Album Review: Stuart A Staples - Arrhythmia

For Stuart A Staples, he of the silken croon out front of UK moodists Tindersticks, it's been 12 years since his last solo album, Leaving Songs.

That record was comfortably in the same musical orbit as Tindersticks - baroque, jazz-informed and dramatic songs placed somewhere between latter-day Talk Talk, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. In the intervening years he's continued to work on film soundtracks, which goes some way to explaining the more cinematic and experimental scope of this new four-track album.

A New Real opens the album with an echo-laden primitive drum machine and a dub bassline before that distinct low, nasally coo of a voice drifts into view, questioning the shape and form of love. Slowly unfurling at a heavy-lidded pace, this song suddenly blooms into cascading keys and strummed guitar, the mood quickly shifting from desolate melancholy to some kind of cautious optimism.

Memories Of Love surveys similar subject matter, this time looking at love as nostalgia. It's in keeping with the album title Arrhythmia, in this case Staples equating irregular heartbeats to being at the mercy of the vagaries of love. It rides on nothing more than a ride cymbal and sparse, resonant piano chords before bells and other percussive melodies permeate the song in the vein of Bjork's textural explorations. Step Into The Grey goes deep soul on a jazzed-out breakbeat as if the rock band Spain were playing R&B. Staples seems to be exploring the greyed-out feeling of post-relationship despair before a restrained string-led avant freakout intervenes.

Music For A Year In Small Paintings is a 30-minute instrumental track that works like a short film. It traverses multiple moods (scenes) borne from the reactions of various musicians to 365 oil paintings of the sky by artist (and Staples' wife) Suzanne Osborne. It takes on modern-classical, ambient and jazz forms with wonderfully emotive and immersive results, making this album an intimate and evocative solo release from the enigmatic Staples.