Come Fly With Me . . .
If you're relatively new to the music of Manchester's Doves, here's a brief history of the trio to get you up to speed: Jimi Goodwin and twins Jez and Andy Williams grow up amidst Manchester's thriving club scene in the 1980s. They form a house band called Sub Sub, and score a minor hit with "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)". Their studio burns down in 1996, and three years later, their manager passes away. Under the name Doves, they release Lost Souls in 2000, one of the most assured, confident debut albums in the last five years, which is nominated for the Mercury Prize. Anticipation grows for their new album, prompting the NME to call them "the new Radiohead". In mid-2002, they release The Last Broadcast, and it lives up to all the high expectations, and then some.
What an album The Last Broadcast is. Surpassing the merits of Lost Souls, one of the best albums of 2000, is no mean feat, but to do it in such breath-taking fashion is something else, something special. It's a more musically diverse album than their last one, but it also has Doves further defining their own original sound. You know a new band knows what it's doing when, two albums in, they already have their own clearly defined sound.
As for the best song an The Last Broadcast, you needn't go any further than "There Goes the Fear". A seven-minute outburst of pure joy, it incorporates the sunny, Big Rock sound their earlier hit "Catch the Sun" only hinted at, with the influence of fellow Mancunians New Order. Over a shimmering, chiming guitar riff and a pulsating beat that hearkens back to their Sub Sub days, bassist Goodwin sings, "Out of here / Out of heartache / Along with fear," as he plays a nifty bass lick. The band breaks into a quiet bridge, as Goodwin gently sings, "Close your brown eyes / And lay down next to me." The effect is like the seconds before a plane leaving the ground, and as Andy Williams loudly crashes his cymbals at the end of the line, "There goes the fear / Let it go," the song takes off into the pop stratosphere. The feeling is euphoric as Goodwin sings about how there's always time to find happiness: "You've turned around and life's passed you by / You look to ones you love to ask them why / You look to those you love to justify." What I love about a band like Doves is how they're not content to make a three or four-minute single; no, like their Manchester predecessors New Order and the Stone Roses, when they find a great hook, they just go with it a while longer. No instrumental wanking, just that same hook, over and over again, without overkill. "There Goes the Fear" carries on like this, until it peters out amidst, oddly enough, Brazilian samba drums, managing to reach the triumphant heights that U2 has been desperately trying to recreate, and failing miserably at, for the past decade. I'm certain I will not hear a better song than "There Goes the Fear" for the rest of the year. I dare any artist to top this one. It won't happen.
"There Goes the Fear" has been available on MP3 for the past three months, and recently rocketed to #3 on the UK singles chart, so the question before the release of The Last Broadcast has been, "Will the rest of the album measure up to such a great tune?" Yes it does. "Words" is a big-sounding, uplifting song sung by guitarist Jez Williams, and the lyrics are positive without resorting to self-help dreck: "Follow your own path from here / So don't listen to what they say / 'Cause inside you've a heart of gold." "M62 Song" (named after the highway it was recorded under in Manchester), also sung by Jez, is a lo-fi re-working of "Moonchild" by art-rockers King Crimson. Instead of singing the original flighty lyrics, "Talking to the trees of the cobweb strange / Sleeping on the steps of the fountain," Williams opts for more down-to-earth fare: "I'm waiting for a time, for truth to call / I'm waiting for a sign, to show me all." Following the ambient instrumental "Where We're Calling From", "N.Y." explodes with loud, distorted guitars before shifting to a breezy acoustic feel, during which Goodwin sings as touching a tribute to New York City as I've heard in the past year: "Put your finger on the map / Who cares where it lands / 'Cause we're all better off in New York." The seven-minute, gospel-infused "Satellites" comes close to the heights of "There Goes the Fear" with its utterly enchanting chorus and its message of newfound hope ("I want you to notice / My anger's all but done").
If "There Goes the Fear" isn't a big hit Stateside, then the propulsive "Pounding" should be. Possessing an intoxicating melody and an explosive, crowd-pleasing chorus that reminds one of the heights The Stone Roses hit with "I Am the Resurrection", Goodwin ack-centuates the positive once again: "See the light / But it won't last forever / Seize the time / Cause it's now or never baby." The band has said they don't want to be compared to U2 (if anything, they deserve to be bigger than U2), but the guitar solo in "Pounding" totally smacks of something The Edge would do. "The Last Broadcast", with its lilting intro, sounds like the band's work on Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour of Bewilderbeast album. If hearing "Pounding" feels like being shout out of a cannon, then listening to "The Last Broadcast" is like swirling like a leaf in a fall breeze. "Friday's Dust" is a dark, yet warm, atmospheric acoustic song (with the coolest bass clarinet accompaniment since Bitches Brew), while "The Sulphur Man" borrows its melodies from The Smiths. The magnificent "Caught By the River", with its stirring chorus of "You give it all away / Don't let it come apart", closes the album in grand fashion, climaxing in a loud, Oasis-like, ecstatic cacophony of layered acoustic and electric guitars.
When "Caught By the River" gently fades out, you have to catch your breath. Perfect albums don't come around very often, but The Last Broadcast is one of those records, an album that will end up near the top of many best-of-the-year lists. An album like this makes you realize the foolishness in Radiohead's attempts at deconstructing their own sound, avoiding the Big Rock cliches. There's nothing criminal in playing huge-sounding, uplifting songs when they're done creatively, and Doves nail it perfectly on The Last Broadcast. You owe it to yourself to sit back and lose yourself in one of the best albums of the year. Simply gorgeous.
— 31 May 2002
