The last time most of us saw Doves it was Glastonbury Festival 2003, headlining Sunday night against Moby. This wasn’t really a problem for them though. The year before, they’d been mid afternoon, playing in glorious weather, a crowd of people wide-eyed at the prospect of whole weekend opening up in front of them to the soundtrack of Catch The Sun. On the Sunday night, under the cover of a million stars shimmering like pinpoints of light in the night sky, they took the place from all competition, hammering home the point that anyone with any sense was going to be there, then, in that field with them. They were the last party before heading back to the grindstone of work and ordinary life, the last broadcast from the stage that anyone would be interested in hearing. Everything you wanted to hear was there, all those songs from the first two albums that sounded like they were written with this moment in mind, written for the tens of thousands who didn’t want to go home now, maybe not ever. Some way for Doves to bow out for a while, some place to start thinking about stuff from scratch.
If the first two Doves albums, Lost Souls and The Last Broadcast, were records that sounded like they were conceived in Glastonbury-like vast open plains, each number a snapshot of the wide open countryside or of the rolling sea, then their third album, Some Cities, paints altogether different pictures. Influenced musically by records as diverse as The Kinks “Village Green Preservation Society” and the “Goodbye Babylon gospel boxset and a lot of Northern Soul” and lyrically, according to Jez, by the fact that “A lot of cities in the North West have gone through radical changes - Manchester over the last eight years, Liverpool in the last couple… I guess some of the songs are about that change, the way that some of the most important, historical buildings have had their hearts ripped out, replaced by temporary pacemakers”, at points it’s crunching and urban, sounding like a midnight high-speed joy ride through the industrial pulsing centre of the city (most noticeably on the turbo charged first single Black And White Town). At others, it’s like a long lost soundtrack to some early ‘60s kitchen sink drama (Someday Soon, Shadows Of Salford). Some Cities could only ever have been born in the North of England and is the sound of a full throttle Doves band. It’s also the sound of the band at their most relaxed and confident, their most driven and fine-tuned. As for differences between the records - “We wanted to make a different sounding record to “The Last Broadcast”, a bit more live sounding, more direct, shorter songs… back to the triple CD rock opera for the next one” (Andy)... Some Cities - Released on March 1, 2005 [ read more ]

Some Cities [ENHANCED]
If the first two Doves albums, Lost Souls and The Last Broadcast, were records that sounded like they were conceived in Glastonbury-like vast open plains, each number a snapshot of the wide open countryside or of the rolling sea, then their third album, Some Cities, paints altogether different pictures. At points it's crunching and urban, sounding like a midnight high-speed joy ride through the industrial beating heart of the city (most noticeably on the turbo charged first single "Black and White Town"). At others, it's like a long lost soundtrack to some early '60s kitchen sink drama ("Someday Soon", "Shadows of Salford"). Some Cities could only ever have been born in the North of England and is the sound of a full throttle Doves band. It's also the sound of the band at their most relaxed and confident, their most driven and fine-tuned. Some Cities arrives almost three years after The Last Broadcast. Conceived as a shorter, more forceful record than its two predecessors, the record was written primarily in cottages and holiday rents around the UK (Snowdonia, Darlington and Youlgreave in the Peak District) and recorded with Ben Hillier (producer of Blur's Think Tank and Elbow's Cast of Thousands) in Liverpool, Brixton and Loch Ness.
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