A four-year absence is a risk for any band, especially in a musical climate as diverse – dare I say saturated – as today’s. It’s more than enough time to fade into distant memory, a once-fresh album turned into another of nostalgia’s trophies, another rising star fallen from the sky and rendered obsolete by those more eager to shine their lights, even if they don’t shine as bright.
That said, four years can also be a much-needed break, a time to regroup, play with some new sounds, rekindle some old ones, and see if there is enough steam left in the engines to create yet another studio piece different enough to earn the acclaim of fans and critics, yet familiar enough that people don’t wonder what happened to the band they came to know and love. Some pass the test; many fail. The rest find themselves in an uncertain musical purgatory, inches away from tipping the scale in one direction or the other.
It was 2005 when the rock band Doves released their last album, Some Cities – a hiatus of epic proportions for a band that only found its legs five years earlier. But while success and stardom are largely attributed to the fans who support the music, credit should be given where credit is due – such as when a band decides to take its time (likely against the wishes of any agent or record label) to produce something worth the fans’ attention. And let’s be real: The love of the music community is much easier to win back after an absence than it is after a bad performance. And after Doves took a seemingly-perpetual hibernation flight south, they’ve at the very least managed to woo us into a reminiscent dinner-and-a-movie with a reasonable possibility for a goodnight kiss.
While it would be an overstatement to say that the band has come miles with their 2009 release, Kingdom of Rust, a satisfying progression can definitely be seen. They’ve done away just about every hint of the pop sound that detracted from their last effort, indicating that the boys from Manchester have given up on trying to please the mainstream and have focused more on trying to please themselves. Songs like “Spellbound” and the current mainstream crowd-pleaser “Winter Hill” have more in common with late-era David Bowie than they do with any of the amateur youth weaseling its way onto the charts and the lush melancholy of “Birds Fly Backwards” boldly spits in the faces of those who say Goodwin’s vocals drag through the soggy swamps of melodrama.
But what holds the attention is the band’s increasing diversity in song style and sound. The title track, for example, manages to successfully teeter the tightrope running along a country-style rhythm with guitar leads preferring to channel something of Blind Melon, while the keys accomplish both what we’d expect from Doves as well as what we’d expect from Pink Floyd. Fast-forward to the ballad “10.03” and you’ll find the simplicity of a repeating theme which builds to epic proportions – including a forty-seven second crescendo which culminates in the song’s mutation to a dynamic rock piece where fuzzy gain and subtle overdrive trade places, rotating between three guitars as they drive us to the twenty-second denouement consisting of the original ballad theme. Dynamic reverb shifts on “Birds Flew Backwards” seem to take us in and out of whatever dream songwriter Jez Williams was floating in and the vaguely psychedelic powerhouse anthem “House of Mirrors” reminds us of The Killers, sans the screeching treble levels.
Of course the trouble with having a distinct musical potluck on a single album is that an embarrassingly disappointing track is infinitely more likely than it would have been on a more homogenous project. For the Kingdom of Rust effort, that embarrassment comes in the tune “Compulsion,” which can’t seem to help but to pitifully scream undertones of Blondie’s “Rapture,” and which also makes the mistake of thinking that the album needed – or even that fans wanted – anything vaguely resembling a dance track. But since I’m not convinced that lambasting an honest mistake in an ocean of otherwise stand-up work makes the situation any better or worse, I merely suggest skipping track eight whenever it comes about.
What cannot be skipped – on the contrary, what deserves much praise – is the album’s opening act, “Jetstream.” It’s hard to tell if Doves made a concerted effort to dabble in tones of electronica on this number, or if it was the happy result of messing around with some keyboard or another which they’d never before discovered – but either way, the result is beyond impressive. While it may have been misleading for the band to kick off the record here, it’s clear why they would do so. “Jetstream” sucks you in from the get-go with a clean, single-channel guitar riff followed by distant, eerie vocals over a matching guitar melody.
What starts as tantalizing electronic layers quickly turns into musical foreplay, teasing the audience for two minutes and forty seconds before bringing us into the beat they really have in store, underscored with subtle techno-beats and acid-trip keyboard effects which, even sober, bring to mind a barrage of something colorful plummeting through a cloudless night sky. The only disappointment with this track is that there isn’t another like it in the band’s entire repertoire, let alone on Kingdom of Rust, which has the effect of tragically overshadowing (though certainly not to the death) the rest of an otherwise-satisfying record.
In the long run, four years is a long time to wait for anything less than stellar. I won’t go so far as to say Doves got lucky this time; the album earns itself more credit than that. But if they don’t turn around a quick follow up and stick a few tour dates on the 2009 calendar, the band may find it difficult to come out of their next season of hibernation.