The Last Broadcast

Somewhere along the way, Doves have become the saviours of British rock music? Did I miss something? OK, so their debut, Lost Souls was impressive… all brooding, epic, melancholy, with waves of guitar cascading over the listener in a moderately-paced throwback to the pomp and ceremony of the ’70s. It was, and still is, a bloody good album, but how on earth did that translate into the kind of mass expectation surrounding The Last Broadcast?

Thankfully for them, the Manchester three-piece deliver on the promise of their debut, as their sophomore effort is brimming with the kind of timeless guitar tunesmithery that marked their earlier work, and, in the shape of songs like ‘Words’, ‘There Goes The Fear’ and ‘Caught By The River’, they’ve found something of a pop sensibility to boot.

Doves’ songs take you in unexpected directions, but this is not always a good thing. For instance, we go straight from the unexpected samba ending of ‘There Goes The Fear’ into the pastoral Nick Drake-isms of ‘M62 Song’, apparently an adaptation of an old King Crimson number, which works about as well as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest.

However, when you plunge pell mell into the middle of ‘N.Y.’, a gloriously uplifting shaker-maker, you could forgive them almost anything. Similarly, ‘Pounding’ is a relatively straightforward song that drags you along with its chug-a-lug metronome beat and breath-of-fresh-air simplicity: this is as close as Strokes fans will ever come to loving Doves.

‘Satellites’ is like Mercury Rev doing gospel, with a side order of Depeche Mode’s faith and devotion, where our heroes are moved to exclaim, “All I’ve known is madness”; echoes of a Martin Gore-fest if ever I heard one.

Meanwhile ‘Friday’s Dust’ is a strange beast, at once baroque and futuristic, a haunting, eerie addition to any album – think Zep’s ‘No Quarter’ shot through with the Syd Barrett’s wilful obscurity and you’re half-way there.

Perhaps even more than their debut. The Last Broadcast is no five-minute fix: more an acquired taste than most of the manufactured muck masquerading as McCulture these days. The arrangements are sometimes over extravagant, the songs rarely less than epic and the lyrics, for the most part, inpenetrable. The philosophy seems to be one of ‘Why use one layer of sound when a hundred will do?’

Still, these Doves are flying their own route through the post-Britpop, post-punk, post-nu-metal, post-ironic landscape that is modern music. In fact, as a great man once (nearly) said, for those about to post-rock, we salute you.