Doves - The Universal Want

About twenty years ago, in my mid-thirties, I spent a year working and living in Catania, Sicily, looking to find myself and some new direction and impetus in my life. I did so eventually, but as so often is the way with these things, not quite in the way I was expecting to.

While I was there, I heard about and bought Lost Souls, the debut album from Manchester trio Doves. It was a record that chimed with me quite a bit at the time. Made by guys who were a similar age to myself who seemed to be coming upon a similar realisation as I was that life may not be ready to yield everything that you had once expected it to. I listened to it a lot through the second half of that important year.

I've kept my eye on Doves since. Not with incredible focus but just because they clearly had a little bit more to them them most guitar, bass, drums outfits of their type. An intelligence. An introspection. I saw them about ten years back in Newcastle where I now live. They were quite good. I left before the end.

Now they have a new album out, entitled the Universal Want, their fifth in all and rather astonishingly their first for eleven years. The band came back together to do some gigs in 2019 and they went well, including a sell out at The Royal Albert Hall. Now they've completed and put out a record.

It's good. It sounds thought through and is sure to satisfy devotees of the band because it has all of the Doves' defining characteristics. Glum anthems, soaring but earthbound. Grounded in reality. A certain, and very English, slight but manageable depression. But constantly trying to say something. Vastly preferable to my ears to bands of a similar sensibility, Stereophonics or Elbow for example.

But that's as far as I'd go, because despite chronicling what it feels like to be in their fifties rather than in their thirties with great acuity, there are few actual risks taken here. So while I tip my hat to Doves, I'm not sure I'll be back to this one much.I'll give it 7.