Doves - Lost Souls

Decade - 2000's


Label - Heavenly
Producer - Doves, Steve Osborne
Country - UK
Genre - Dream Rock

1	Firesuite**	4:36
2	Here It Comes**	4:50
3	Break Me Gently	4:38
4	Sea Song**	6:12
5	Rise	5:38
6	Lost Souls	6:09
7	Melody Calls	3:27
8	Catch the Sun	4:49
9	The Man Who Told Everything	5:47
10	The Cedar Room	7:38
11	Reprise	1:45
12	A House	3:40

Doves - Lost Souls (2000)

This is a somewhat difficult review to write, because I liked this more than it really deserves. Is that possible? I figure so - because I can think of a million flaws but I still liked it anyway.

Hailing from Manchester, the Doves have obviously been influenced by shoegaze, noise pop and even perhaps, Radiohead, The Verve and Oasis on their debut.

The Doves are good at atmospheric, moody rock. Mostly every song has a hypnotic riff that burrows into your brain, but it is coherency to a fault as their compositions are dull in this respect and also meander and lack direction. They tend to repeat the same song over with a not-different-enough melody throughout, but they are nice melodies, so a point there. I like albums that feel like an album rather than a mish mash of songs that bear no relation to each other in tone or lyric, and this feels very much like an album. I'm just not sure it really articulates anything other than "this sounds really nice".

Don't bother even reading the lyrics, the Doves follow a shoegaze tradition of the lyrics and vocals taking a backseat to the music. While they aren't horrendously bad or embarrassing, they are fairly uninteresting and pedestrian. Similarly, the vocals just sound like they are there, hidden somewhere behind the music without much personality.

But for all their faults, the Doves really have made a solid album that is good, just not enough to keep you interested if that's all you are doing. Not enough movement in the songs and similar compositions mean that the songs don't stand out as individual tracks. However, they do blend as a nice, spacey soundscape. If that's what they were after, they succeeded.

As is the nature of music, I still like it far more than some of the albums I've listened to that are clearly better!

Score - 8.5/10

Recommended - Yes