Kingdom of Rust.

I’ll be on the Herd today at 12:25 pm EDT, and am tentatively scheduled to appear on Mike and Mike tomorrow morning at 7:24 am EDT. My hit on Phoenix’s KTAR from yesterday morning is downloadable here.

I’ve been a Doves fan since 2000 or so after hearing a few tracks from their debut album, Lost Souls, which they followed with one of the best albums of the decade, the epic The Last Broadcast, which was a huge hit in the U.K. but got very little airplay here outside of a car commercial that used one of the album’s singles, “Words.” Their newest release, Kingdom Of Rust, doesn’t quite live up to the peaks of The Last Broadcast but is more consistently above-average and improves with each listen.

Kingdom contains two standout tracks, several more strong ones, and a little bit of unfortunate filler (although I doubt Doves views them that way). The first standout is the title track, a rockabilly-meets-shoegazing track with mournful singing over an upbeat drum pattern – a juxtaposition that more or less defines Doves’ sound over their four studio albums. The other, oddly enough, is a download-only bonus track, “Ship of Fools,” with an intro that borrows from Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” (but not from World Party’s one real hit) before expanding into a less folky, more rock-oriented song with a haunting minor piano riff.

“House of Mirrors” has a late-60s, Pink Floyd in the Syd Barrett era feel, while “Compulsion” revolves around a late-70s/early 80s funk-meets-new-wave drum-and-bass combination. The opener, “Jetstream,” harkens back to their dance-oriented roots as one-hit wonder Sub Sub, with an insistent, sparse guitar lick that takes over the song halfway through and compensates for the under-sung vocals. The driving “The Outsiders” sounds more like a leftover track from Lost Souls, a song filled with thick, fuzzy guitar work that make the entire song crackle with energy. The only real duds are the album’s closer (sans bonus tracks) “Lifelines,” musically and lyrically a complete drag; and “10:03,” which doesn’t kick into gear until shortly before the three-minute mark and has some nails-on-the-chalkboard vocals from Jimi Goodwin. The lapses are more than covered by the two bonus tracks, the aforementioned “Ship of Fools” and the plaintive “The Last Son.”

The one thing that ties Doves songs together is an emphasis on atmospheric music that still drives forward, a musical equivalent to the narrative greed that sets great novels apart from good (and lousy) ones. When they nail a riff on top of that base of sound, as they do about a half-dozen times on Kingdom of Rust, they’re one of the best bands going.

If you’re not familiar with Doves’ work, you could also start with the following singles: “The Cedar Room” and “The Man Who Told Everything” from Lost Souls; “Words,” “There Goes the Fear,” and “The Pounding” from The Last Broadcast; and “Black and White Town” from Some Cities.