Doves, The Universal Want, review: there’s nothing as beautiful as musical misery
With the possible exceptions of U2 and The Rolling Stones, breaking up and reuniting seems to have become the inevitable career-path of major rock bands. Yet even after reading interviews with Manchester trio Doves, I remain confused about why they ceased operations in 2010, only to resume a decade later as if nothing had happened.
A trio of school friends from Manchester who got together in 1989, they took a long time to achieve success but established a huge reputation at the tail-end of Britpop as purveyors of moodily atmospheric space-rock, releasing four acclaimed albums between 2000 and 2009. And then they just seemed to drift off, announcing a short hiatus only to somehow neglect to get back together.
Considering the bruising melancholy of their oeuvre, it was easy to imagine them falling into a slough of middle-aged despond where they just couldn’t be bothered to return each other’s calls. But Doves never officially broke up, and in 2018 their fans started a petition to encourage their return, in case the band needed reminding. By then, it turns out, the trio had started swapping musical ideas by email. Now, 11 years since their last album, Kingdom of Rust, they have finally delivered a follow up, The Universal Want. “Time really does fly,” bassist and vocalist Jim Goodwin commented.
I have to say that the band’s overall mood doesn’t seem to have been improved by their time off, during which they have all turned 50 and, if anything, sound less enthusiastic about being in a band than they ever did before. “Hello old friend, it’s been a while, it’s me again,” Goodwin sings on Prisoners. Then, lest you get too excited by the prospect of a cheery reconciliation, he adds: “We’re just prisoners of these times.” (Thanks for the reminder, mate, it’s lovely to see you too.) “We’re just prisoners, prisoners,” Goodwin reiterates in his familiar tone of lugubrious gloom.
To be fair, we all know how that feels right now – but Goodwin lays it on pretty thick. “We’re just prisoners / In dusty halls and to the hollow shopping malls / To the endless rows of English roses.” With his extended Midlands vowels and thick furry baritone, he may have the single most downbeat voice in popular music. “If you gotta believe in someone, don’t make that person me,” he insists, and you may feel like going: “OK then, lovely to see you, don’t forget to write…”
But here’s the thing. There is something about the tension and balance afforded by Doves’ lyrical and melodic heaviness, the pounding thrill of their hard-driven grooves, and the glittering psychedelic detail of cinemascopic arrangements, that is mesmeric and compelling. There’s a squalling lead solo at the end of Prisoners that seems intended to leave listeners shaking with a passion that’s almost the antithesis of the dour miserabilism of the song’s tone. The delicate interweaving of funkily soulful guitars on Broken Eyes is a silver lining threaded through a song of devastating disappointment (“You only ever looked at me through broken eyes”).
Cycle of Hurt opens with what sounds like the most depressed robot since Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the original paranoid android. “Hello, I need to stop this cycle of hurt / It’s a trap, a circle in dirt,” a monotone vocoder recites, before the band take off on an interstellar groove like a funky rocket fired into a black hole. “I’m tired of me, I’m tired of me, I’m tired of suckling in your stir / I need to end this cycle of hurt,” Goodwin moans as glorious guitars chime in starry patterns, cosmic synths shimmer and shudder, and bass and drums lock into a pattern as dazzlingly tight as X-wings in formation flight.
Doves originally took off by marrying the anthemic guitar-band heft of Britpop with the psychedelic colours of trance and techno. Yet both those musical styles have a tendency towards hands-in-the-air optimism that Doves have never been able to embrace. Instead, they wound up in a space occupied by a few gorgeously undemonstrative bands such as The Blue Nile and Talk Talk, marrying the instrumental textures and complexity of progressive rock to deeply emotional songcraft.
It as if the music were constantly trying to take off into the ether, but were kept in check by internal gravity. “Your eyes are fixed on the stars / Yet your feet still fixed to the dirt,” as Goodwin sings on Cycle of Hurt, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about gutters and stars. Goodwin, though, sings like he prefers it in the gutter. The result is a kind of endless yearning, the beauty and grace of melody and rhythm as an antidote to lyrical pessimism. “It’s a trick, it’s a trap,” repeats the depressed robot over and over in the fade-out of Cycle of Hurt, but it’s a trick that works every time, and a trap that you willingly enter.
The Universal Want is out on Heavenly today
