There’s a bittersweet irony in the fact that the last time we doffed our caps at Doves they were headlining Sunday night against Moby at the Glastonbury Festival 2003 – an eternity in music terms, giving that this was in some hazy, cautious period for the UK music industry, shortly before we really found our feet with the jerky, imponderable panache and swagger of the new breed of indie icons: the Franz Ferdinands, the Libertineses, the Keanes, the Snow Patrols; ironic in that both had reached somekind of zenith in their respective careers before collapsing into a non-sequential and surprising hiatus. Obscured for the most part by our shameless appetite for all things New York and all things scruffy, garagey and denim, Doves held a dazzling torch aloft for a fairly tentative UK market with their idiosyncratic brand of widescreen stadium rock, rich in thought if not in attitude and as sweeping and colossal as a broadcast from heaven. The stars in the sky at Glastonbury literally wept in admiration. The festival itself seemed somehow built around them, making the last pounding beats of The Last Broadcast all the more significant and almighty for it. This was a band about to break orbit. And then there was nothing.
So it may come as some surprise to learn that the Doves are back: not as big as before, but certainly more direct. If the first two Doves albums, ‘Lost Souls’ and ‘The Last Broadcast’ courted the broad, sweeping plains of some sprawling spiritual wilderness, new album, ‘Some Cities’ sees them home in on their own backgarden. But if you were expecting the turn from the cosmic to the domestic to be a meek and trifling affair, think again.
Those of you who have already heard the first sizeable slices of lead-off single, ‘Black and White Town’ will understand that the band are tending their garden with all the pomp and grandeur that made tracks like ‘Caught By The River’ so intense and inspiring. Like many of the tracks on ‘Some Cities’, ‘Black and White Town’ focuses on the typically sorrowful and bleak affairs of life in the north of England; kitchen-sink in principal, but not in execution. More moderate and humble in terms of production, ‘Someday Soon’ provides an eerie, quiet majesty to the grossly existential issues of loss and loneliness. ‘Shadows Of Salford’ is a similar proposition; a thin-sounding and solitary piano taps out a desultory search through consciousness. The spangling, stomping and upbeat ‘Sky Starts Falling’, however, proves that you don’t have court misery without a spring in your step or a smile on your face; the song’s clomping Motown beat literally pulling you up from your knees and onto your feet.
It may be a slightly gentle, morose and pedestrian affair at times but it’s not short of either passion or persuasion. Salford rocks once more….
share this:
