I’ve been a Doves fan since 2000 or so after hearing a few tracks from their debut album, Lost Souls<\/i>, which they followed with one of the best albums of the decade, the epic The Last Broadcast<\/i>, 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<\/a> Kingdom<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n “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<\/i>, 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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/i>, they’re one of the best bands going.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[852],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=meadowpartyco-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0029EGJHS\")
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