Doves: Kingdom Of Rust

There’s something simultaneously admirable and a little ornery about the way Manchester modern rock band Doves keeps returning to the same yearning, billowing, slightly scarred midtempo anthems it started out with a decade ago. The sound of Doves’ fourth album, Kingdom Of Rust, is the sound of the early ’00s, when a legion of bands from the UK and elsewhere spent their time splitting the difference between Swervedriver and U2, creating big-sounding, vaguely ominous music for The Bubble Age. Listeners feeling nostalgic for those times will likely find a lot to like about Kingdom Of Rust, with its skipping rhythms, chiming guitars, wobbly sheets of synthesizer, and the throaty, eyes-screwed-shut yelp of frontman Jimi Goodwin. And even those who think Doves peaked with 2002’s sprawling The Last Broadcast should appreciate the new album’s sonic depth, which gives the band’s old whisper-to-shout style more fluidity. As Doves drift through the title track—moving from a hushed, organic guitar-bass-drums format to something more orchestrated and stormy—they show off all the tricks they’ve learned over the past 10 years, about how to build a big space and then fill it with an electric, multicolored haze.