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Music reviews |
Doves - Some Cities
Shimmering, swirling, layered, guitar-laden, melodic - Doves' best yet.
Capitol Records
Release date: 3/1/05
Rating: B+1. Some Cities 3:22
2. Black and White Town 4:15
3. Almost Forgot Myself 4:42
4. Snowden 4:12
5. The Storm 4:52
6. Walk in Fire 5:34
7. One of These Days 4:50
8. Someday Soon 4:08
9. Shadows of Salford 2:44
10. Sky Starts Falling 4:11
11. Ambition 4:00
Like Coldplay, Doves produces music that is hugely melodic and very accessible, even while being layered, grandiose, melancholic and self-important. Yet even though Doves runs creative circles around their fellow Brits, who seem content to keep re-slicing the baloney and churning out the same product, Coldplay’s X & Y is going to outsell Some Cities by a multiple.
It’s not quite clear why that is. It could simply be that Doves doesn’t pass the Starbucks Test. The Manchester threesome’s music is probably too complex and, occasionally, too gripping to be piped in behind the sounds of baristas serving lattes to young urban professionals. Coldplay, on the other hand, passes the Starbucks Test swimmingly.
If you’re already familiar with Doves, you’ll be happy to know that Some Cities is arguably the best yet of the band’s three albums. It’s a bit more polished (for both good and ill) than Lost Souls, their 2000 debut. (Lost Souls technically wasn’t a debut, since until their studio burned down in 1996, Doves was a decent-selling electronic-dance outfit called Sub Sub.) It’s far more listenable than 2002’s spotty The Last Broadcast, which was dragged down by too many slow, murmuring, hook-free tracks (“Willow Song,” “Satellites,” “Friday’s Dust,” “The Sulphur Man”). Some Cities does lack the soaring, signature anthems that stood out from those first two albums (“Sea Song,” “Catch the Sun,” “Words,” “There Goes the Fear”). But the album as a whole is far more consistently good, which is why it has stayed in my CD player far longer than the first two.
Its eleven songs are a bit hard to describe. They tend a bit toward the melancholy, even chilly; even the faster tracks evoke rainy days in Britain, whether in the gray cities or the misty countryside. But instead of moping along, Some Cities shimmers with guitar effects, echoes, strong bass lines and insistent rhythms.
The first two songs draw the listener in with more of a straight rock sound than we’ve heard from the group before. “Some Cities” kicks off the album with a pounding drum and lead-guitar part vaguely reminiscent of early-80s U2, and its chorus and guitar solo are quite catchy. “Black and White Town,” the first single, borrows heavily from Martha and the Vandellas’ classic “Heat Wave” (one of several examples of a faint Motown influence), and will definitely win the group new listeners if they ever get any airplay.
The really pretty tracks begin with number three, “Almost Forgot Myself,” a swirl of psychedelic guitars, thumping drums and an infectious chorus. The next song, “Snowden,” is even better. Chiming electric guitar arpeggios, theremin, female backing vocals, and who knows what else layer together for four minutes that are both mournful and exuberant at the same time.
“The Storm,” a collaboration with pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, has pretty strings and harmonica, but is a bit too slow, unmelodic and meandering, a bit of a comedown from the heights of “Snowden.” It’s followed by “Walk in Fire,” another swirling, uptempo song that probably deserves to be a hit single as much as “Black and White Town.” At five and a half minutes, though, it’s about a minute or two too long for what it has to say.
“One of These Days” is a minor-key highlight, laden with chiming guitars and that insistent beat. “Someday Soon” slows the tempo with melancholy acoustic guitars driving the verses; you can almost see the rain falling on the north English heath. The a capella choruses may be a bit emotionally overwrought, but the instrumental parts and those guitars are gorgeous.
The subdued, minimalist “Shadows of Salford,” sung (not too well) by Jez Williams instead of Jimi Goodwin, evokes “M62 song” from The Last Broadcast; at 2 ½ minutes, it wisely exits before it wears out its welcome. “Sky Starts Falling” is perfectly catchy – in fact, it sounds a bit like “Catch the Sun” from Lost Souls – but it’s not clear why the band chose to put this hard-charging track as the third of the album’s four final songs, the other three of which are quite slow-paced and melancholy. The transition is jarring. The last song, “Ambition,” is something of a throwaway with murmured vocals and no real structure.
Though Some Cities is a great record, it does reveal some of Doves’ limitations. Andy Williams is not a great drummer, he’s more in the basic Ringo Starr / Meg White constant-pounding mode. Jimi Goodwin’s vocal range is probably about half an octave, but he’s usually buried in the mix, which is fine but often makes the lyrics unnecessarily hard to discern. What we can hear of the lyrics, though, isn’t particularly compelling – they’re serviceable, but Doves aren’t poets.
That said, the album is highly recommended. If I owned a coffeeshop, I’d certainly play Doves while I served up the macchiatoes. But then, of course, it would be only a matter of time until Starbucks, and their soothing Coldplay soundtrack, opened up next door and ran me out of business. So much for that, then.
