Past Imperfect - The Best Of Tindersticks '92-'21 (2LP)

Tindersticks never chased the zeitgeist. They built their own world instead, a slow-burning universe of baritone croon, woodwind sighs, brushed drums and that unmistakeable sense of late-night cinema. Past Imperfect, a career-spanning best-of covering 1992 to 2021 and issued by City Slang in 2022, makes a strong case that this world has held steady for three decades without ever getting stale. It is less a victory lap than a map, tracing a path from the smoky grandeur of the early records to the leaner, pulsing tension of recent years.

The early sequence still lands like a fever dream. You get the lilt and ache that drew so many of us in back in the mid 90s, the moment Stuart A. Staples’ voice became a lodestar. The band’s first era, with Dickon Hinchliffe’s string arrangements binding everything together, felt like chamber soul for people who love Jacques Brel and Stax in equal measure. Travelling Light, the duet with Carla Torgerson of The Walkabouts, remains a heart-stopper, the kind of song that makes time slow in the room. Tiny Tears, forever tagged in popular memory to a gutting scene in The Sopranos, still carries the same sense of bruised inevitability. And City Sickness, from the debut, serves as a reminder that Tindersticks had urgency as well as melancholy, that their songs could walk quickly, eyes down, through a rain-slicked city and never lose their footing.

Past Imperfect works because it refuses to be just a nostalgia set. After the band’s mid-2000s reset, when Hinchliffe departed and the core of Staples, David Boulter and Neil Fraser steered the ship, the sound sharpened and toughened. The selection shows how that change paid off. The Something Rain era brought a looser swing, organ lines curling around stories that felt lived-in rather than posed. The Waiting Room added colour through the band’s long-standing love of film, complete with collaborations and short films that accompanied the songs. Then the late 2010s and early 2020s gave us the refined romance of Pinky in the Daylight and the hypnotic churn of Man Alone, proof that the group could stretch into minimal, near-motorik territory without losing their soul.

The sequencing is canny. It does not simply run chronologically, it breathes. Tender moments sit next to songs that smoulder, so you hear how the palette shifts over years without the mood ever breaking. Duets are used sparingly, which makes them hit harder. Sometimes It Hurts, with the late Lhasa de Sela, still feels like two friends at a bar at closing time, trading truths. When the horns come in, you remember how integral those reed and brass textures are to the Tindersticks spell, not just decoration but part of the voice.

If you have followed the band’s long partnership with filmmaker Claire Denis, you will hear echoes of that cinematic sensibility in everything here, even though this is a collection of band songs rather than score cues. Tindersticks make rooms feel different. They always have. You can trace that through small details, like the way a vibraphone softens the edges of a phrase, or how Staples stretches a vowel until it frays a little and tells you more than the lyric on the page.

On vinyl, the flow makes even more sense, side breaks acting like small curtains. Past Imperfect vinyl copies have been steady sellers in our corner of the world, and with good reason. This is the kind of compilation that turns curious listeners into loyal fans, and it rewards those of us already deep in the catalogue. If you are crate-digging for Tindersticks vinyl, this sits neatly beside the self-titled early LPs and The Something Rain, a handy primer and a mood you will want to revisit. And if you are trying to buy Tindersticks records online, this one is often the gateway, the record you gift to the friend who loves Scott Walker and Nina Simone but has not yet wandered into this bar.

It is also a reminder that Tindersticks are a band of players, not just a voice. Fraser’s guitar is all fine-grained restraint, never showy, always exact. Boulter’s keys carry half the narrative weight. The rhythm sections across the years know when to tuck in and when to let the song lope. That collective poise is why the old favourites sit so comfortably next to late-era cuts. Nothing here feels like a compromise for radio, yet plenty of it could soundtrack your life for months.

If you are hunting Past Imperfect vinyl in a Melbourne record store, you will likely find it filed under compilations, but treat it like an album, because it plays like one. For those building a shelf, it also anchors a tidy search cluster, since Tindersticks albums on vinyl can be a rabbit hole. Happy to see that rabbit hole becoming easier to navigate in vinyl records Australia circles. However you come to it, this set gives you the heart of the band in one reach, tender, smoky, quietly enormous.