"Too many deaths and betrayals, too many lies," sings Stuart Staples on the seventh Tindersticks album, providing a handy episode update for those finally just joining the Nottingham noir-soul sextet. But, as it appears in the context of the breezy piano-rolled folk lullaby "The Flicker of a Little Girl", the line sounds less like an advertisement for Tindersticks' signature brand of sorrow than a repudiation of it-- that after nearly two decades of pondering love and all its attendant emotions (jealousy, misery, numbness), Staples regrets to inform you he's all out of regret.

But then Staples hasn't so much turned a new leaf as had one turned for him: In 2006, half of his band turned in their resignation papers, most notably Dickon Hinchcliffe, who, in the most reductive rock-speak, was the Richards to Staples' Jagger (if Keith was a violin player and wrote a mean brass arrangement). And amid a career marked by label changes, Tindersticks-- reconstituted as a five piece-- once again find themselves with a new North America benefactor: Constellation Records, whose godspeed-dominated roster is becoming increasingly populated with former major-label-bankrolled eccentrics (Vic Chestnutt, Carla Bozulich) seeking artistic refuge and a second (or third) wind.

Ironically, Tindersticks' first offering to the most notoriously non-conformist indie label this side of Dischord is an album that feels remarkably in tune with contemporary British pop music's neo-soul slant. Though for Tindersticks, this is hardly a product of calculated trend-spotting: The band have been leavening their blue-eyed/black-lung balladry with classic soul touches-- warm Hammond organ tones, tambourine-rattled rhythms, female back-up singers— as far back as 1999's un-ironically titled Simple Pleasures, an album that, at the time, seemed to pale next to the string-swept dramatics that defined Tindersticks' epochal first three albums. But nine years on, that move seems brilliantly prescient-- to the point where, now, it's not a stretch to envision Staples selling The Hungry Saw's first single, the nocturnal soul knockout "Yesterdays Tomorrows", to Amy Winehouse and retiring a happy man.

Naturally, that song appears second on the new album's tracklist (following a typically solemn introductory piano piece), because Tindersticks have always been a second-song band, opting for low-key opening tracks before delivering a bold follow-up strike-- from the devastating "A Night In" on 1995's self-titled second album, to the simmering "Heard It Through the Grapevine" strut of "People Keep Comin' Around" on 2001's Can Our Love… to the raging pocket symphony "Say Goodbye to the City" on 2003's Waiting for the Moon. But in The Hungry Saw's case, the early appearance of "Yesterday Tomorrow"-- with its booming drumbeat, lustrous organ tones and brassy accents-- seems designed to assert that Hinchcliffe's departure has not diminished the band's cinematic scope. With that business settled, the record turns increasingly more restrained, as it reconciles the band's well-established soul affinities with a more pastoral presentation, in the spirit of Staples' recent solo efforts.

Of course, Staples' bruised baritone has always formed the emotional core of just about every Tindersticks song. However, the band's most arresting moments have come when Staples' vulnerable voice seems on the verge of being swept up by the musical maelstroms stewing around him, and, with few exceptions, The Hungry Saw doesn't really try to test his fortitude: with their smoky, solitary atmosphere and muted string arrangements, "The Other Side of the World" and "All the Love" are textbook Tindersticks ballads-- and beautifully rendered ones at that-- but they don't ever go for the throat like their closest antecedent, Waiting for the Moon's stunning orchestral set piece, "My Oblivion".

Instead, The Hungry Saw's temperate approach feels like the work of a band who are grateful for a new lease on life, but not sure exactly what to do with it, proffering brief experiments that amount to little more than amusing curios (the self-explanatory "The Organist Entertains") or instrumentals that sound like guide tracks waiting for a vocal supplement (the tremoloed psychedelic samba of "E Type"). The laissez-faire feeling seems most pronounced on "Mother Dear", a fog-covered hymnal guided by muffled organ tones and a subterranean drum stomp that-- just after Staples utters the line "it's not so serious, after all"-- is mischievously interrupted by arrhythmic blues riffing that suggests the band has a sense of humour about their downcast demeanor. It's immediately followed by "Boobar", which for its opening 20 seconds, suggests another solitary Staples serenade about lost love, before slowly blossoming into a wonderful Spectorized call-and-response finale. If The Hungry Saw teaches us anything new about Tindersticks, it's that these moments of levity no longer serve as brief, incongruous respites from the bleakness, but instead form a series of steps toward an end goal of contentment-- as epitomized by closing track "The Turns We Took". The titular line is completed by the words "…to get here"-- "here" being a soothing, string-swirled Velvet Underground groove over which Staples catalogues a lifetime of cruel twists and-- perhaps speaking for the entire band-- decides there's no shame in walking the straight line.