New Doves – Have You Missed Them?

Judging by the collective excitement displayed by the Twitterati, coupled with Radio 1’s surprise enthusiasm for new single ‘Kingdom Of Rust’ at Radio 1, it looks like a lot of people are keyed up about the imminent return of Doves.

Doves

Certainly there’s a greater groundswell of interest than greeted 2005’s ‘Some Cities’, which leads me to wonder if Doves will be this year’s Elbow – ie a long-running band that the nation suddenly, and unexpectedly, decides to take to its heart, almost out of guilt for having taking them for granted so long.

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We’ve had the album, also called ‘Kingdom Of Rust’, in the office ahead of its release on April 6, and the word “masterpiece” has been bandied around on the strength of just a couple of listens. That may be a bit premature, but the lead single definitely wouldn’t sound out of place on the trio’s career-high ‘The Last Broadcast’.

Lyrically we’re on solid Jimi Goodwin territory, familiar from ‘Black And White Town’ and ‘Shadows Of Salford’, with a sense of questing, lovelorn desperation (“I want to feel some beauty in my heart”) set against a forbidding urban landscape ( “Blackbirds flew into the cooling towers”). As ever, the Manchester skyline is the source of his misery, but it’s also the site of potential transcendence – albeit of a particularly gloomy, rain-lashed kind.

What’s interesting about this song, though, is the way Goodwin allows his miserablist-romantic persona to roam beyond the bounds of the city, out into the moors. Out there in the wild, he comes across as a Heathcliff figure, listening to the thunder rage around him – the scruffy Northern soul as Byronic hero.

With the qualification, then, that this radio rip doesn’t do justice to the depth and precision of the production, have a listen and tell us what you think. Worth the (almost) four-year wait?

You can also download the album’s electro-flecked opening track ‘Jetstream’ – written as an imaginary, alternative soundbed for the closing credits of Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ – at Doves.net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuXnrA_T0gk

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