http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/03/doves-kingdom-of-rust-review wrote:For most of the noughties, record-buyers have indulged in a weird neophilia. It's not so much wanting to hear music unlike anything they've heard before - quite the opposite - but wanting a regular turnover of new artists: unfamiliar faces doing oddly familiar things. The effect on the life expectancy of bands has been dramatic. These days, if you manage to get to your third album without a collapse in sales and interest, you qualify for a royal telegram and a flypast from the Red Arrows.
Then, last year, The Seldom Seen Kid suddenly hoisted Elbow from indie also-rans to national-treasure status. It was a victory that may have reacquainted audiences with the dimly remembered pleasure of following a band that slowly comes good, getting better rather than worse over time, and reinforced the appeal of songs that are clearly born out of hard-won experience. Suddenly, maturity was made to look like a virtue rather than a burden.
Comparisons between Elbow and Doves seem inevitable. Both emerged at around the same time, both are resolutely unglamorous, and the two bands sound not unlike each other, trading in wistful, rain-lashed, expansive and ineffably north-western rock - though Doves' musical capaciousness seems less rooted in a love of prog than their past as dance producers Sub Sub.
The big difference is that Doves have beem vastly more successful than Elbow were until The Seldom Seen Kid. Both 2002's The Last Broadcast and 2005's Some Cities reached No 1, the former boosted by the single There Goes the Fear, perhaps the perkiest song ever written about experiencing a crushing drug comedown while in the aftermath of a relationship's failure. That song is as good an introduction as any to Doves' weird habit of setting lyrics mired in soul-searching melancholy to music that is euphoric - not in the surging, keep-your-chin-up style of post-Coldplay stadium rock, but in the boggle-eyed hands-in-the-air style of the dancefloor. 'Think of me when he calls out,' implored singer Jimi Goodwin, while in the background, the Rio carnival appeared to kick off, batucada drums and all.
Nevertheless, theirs is the kind of success that seems destined to slip by quietly. Doves just don't seem like a chart-topping rock band - possibly because they don't look like one. Their photographs give off an oddly crestfallen aura, their weatherbeaten faces etched with confused disappointment: they look like workmen who have just been informed that the EU has declared tea-breaks and wearing jeans that expose your bum-crack illegal.
It's a curious state of affairs - No 1 artists who still carry an underdog aura - but it means that Kingdom of Rust sounds not like a band comfortably consolidating their previous success, but something more exciting: a band unexpectedly, subtly but unequivocally shifting up a gear. You could argue that Kingdom of Rust is not vastly different from previous Doves albums. Folky guitar figures ground their airier musical conceits; the thud and rush of the dancefloor never seems far away; the more euphoric the music gets; the more miserable everyone in the songs becomes. 'Home feels like a place I've never been,' protests Goodwin as a preposterously uplifting psychedelic soul stomp called House of Mirrors achieves vertical takeoff. And the landscape of Lancashire is depicted with the grand Romanticism songwriters usually reserve for America: 'The road back to Preston was covered all in snow,' they sing, sounding not bathetic or knowing, but rather awestruck at the sight.
And yet the album is unmistakably better than its predecessors. At first, its superiority seems weirdly indefinable, beyond a consistency in songwriting quality - aside from the overly mournful Bird Flew Backwards, there are no real duds. But gradually, some lovely touches reveal themselves. The title track not only has a beautiful tune, but a beautiful sense of dynamics: the strings don't sound arranged so much as entwined around the song. The dance influences seem more prominent and more perfectly integrated into Doves' sound than before. The Outsiders blends an insistent motorik pulse with a fathomless, dubby echo and fashionably kitsch-disco synth arpeggios. The bassline of Compulsion wittily skips from the doomy chug of reggae to strutting disco to the unexpected slap of funk.
You might think that a band who choose to add slap bass to their songs in 2009 is one that has a certain confidence: you've got to be pretty self-assured to dabble with a sound so reviled. But a certain confidence is all over Kingdom of Rust. Not the brash, cocksure swagger of a debut album, but the quiet conviction that comes with experience. It sounds like another victory for maturity.