New Music: Tindersticks – “Black Smoke”

Tindersticks
Photo by David Greenwald

“Black Smoke,” the first single for Tindersticks’ upcoming Falling Down a Mountain, finds the evocative rockers moving farther from the smoldering jazz club pop of their earlier days and deeper into the riff-driven ’60s psych they embraced on 2008’s The Hungry Saw. It’s not a move without promise — the track has the wild eyes and half-sketched arrangements of the genre’s fuzzier efforts, but ever-elegant singer Stuart A. Staples can’t seem to break character to get down and dirty with the band. Jury’s out on this one.

Tindersticks – “Black Smoke”: mp3

(Falling Down a Mountain is due on February 16, 2010, on Constellation)