Album: Doves - Constellations for the Lonely

Doves really are quite prog rock aren’t they? It’s never really leapt out at me before, probably because I’d always thought of them as brooding indie first and foremost.

There are elements of things like spaghetti western soundtracks, Scott Walker vadevillianism, krautrock rhythms and electronica woven in, sure, but those things were all in service of songs that definitely seemed to come from an unpretentious “alternative” tradition, dosed with northern kitchen sink grit, light years away from the flash of big Seventies acts.  

Perhaps it’s because their initial flush of success in the 00s came alongside Elbow, Keane and Coldplay, all of whom did a similar thing of slightly deadpan song delivery concealing the grandiosity of their performance. Because all of that was presented with an indie framing and lineage we all just accepted that it was indie, even as all those acts leapfrogged into stadium-level success (Doves included: every one of their albums to date has hit number one). 

Despite being recorded in a semi-detached fashion with the band in separate studios, this album feels very much a continuation for Doves. It’s as wide-screen and rain-swept as ever, full of the Beckettian “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” blend of despair and determination that’s always given their work its light and shade – especially on the most obvious Big Song, the folky, string-soaked “Last Year’s Man”. But then a couple of listens in it hits: “Strange Weather” is Pink Floyd. Is just is. Massed “ahhh-ahh” voices, huge keyboards and swooshing noises, pauses for effect before a chord modulation, it’s all there.  

Suddenly it becomes clear: though they may be northern blokes in anoraks and overcoats, their existential wranglings and sonic ambition are way closer to peak ear Floyd than they are to any Lamacq-friendsly indie shamblers. And once you hear it it’s everywhere: the Radiohead-ish surge of “In the Butterfly House”, the admittedly short but still dramatic wah-wah guitar solo of “Stupid Schemes”, the intense drama of “Orlando”. This is a prog band, and always has been. Like all prog bands, and like all Doves albums to date, there is a bit of bloat here, but nonetheless they still hit dizzying highs – “Strange Weather” highest of all, in fact – and their demented ambition is definitely to be saluted. 

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