The thing is, the Albert Hall gig was no accident: their revival as a recording unit had, actually, been set in train two years previously: “Jez and I went up to the Peak District to work on some ideas,” says drummer Andy of his brother and lead guitarist. “The place we rented wasn’t that far away from where Jimi lives, so we just got in touch and asked him whether he fancied coming up. Just to hang out really.” Their separation hadn't been the result of any disagreement. “We were never that far apart,” Williams says. “I’d call Jimi every month. We’re too closely tied to have lost contact. I’d miss them.”
Indeed, the great question is why they didn't get back together sooner during the hiatus that saw Goodwin release a solo album, Odludek, and the brothers release music as Black Rivers. The simple answer is, they just didn't. In the Peaks, however, there was no game plan, as such, but through jamming together, the seeds of The Universal Want - released today - were sown, and an album of ten tracks emerged. “There were times when we felt an indescribable buzz,” reveals Andy Williams, who said the writing process was quite relaxed. “It was a breeze compared to Kingdom Of Rust [their last album], with one of the nicest things being just hanging out.”
When Doves appeared last year at the Albert Hall there was no hint of new material coming. But to the adoring crowd, enraptured by a 13-song set of their decidedly widescreen songs, hope sprang eternal that the appearance was only a taster. A series of outdoor gigs over the following months merely whetted the appetite further and, specifically, the prospect of new material to build on their four studio albums, Lost Souls, The Last Broadcast, Some Cities and Kingdom Of Rust. Released between 2000 and 2009, they established Doves as a compelling blend of industrial energy, roots in club music and even jazz, and a somewhat northern bleakness, all the result of Goodwin’s languorous vocals, Andy Williams’ crisp rhythms and his brother’s jangling, reverb-dripping noirish guitars.
Perhaps the freewheeling Peak District sessions and the extended break have opened up new avenues of exploration. The Universal Want is, the trio calls it, a “shapeshifting album”, tapping into influences as disparate as David Bowie and 1970s soul. There’s a joyous, libertarian freshness about the album from the outset, with opener Carousels, and its allusions to seaside amusements and a more innocent time, underpinned by a sampled loop of the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen. Indeed, Allen’s rhythms provided something of a starting point for the album itself with the Afrobeat-infused Mother Silverlake amongst the first songs to emerge from the jams up on t'moors. I Will Not Hide - not the statement on the band’s absence that it might suggest - adds a brightness, with an uplifting poppiness, a joyous simplicity and a notable absence of the guitars of previous Doves songs, and more sonic experimentation in its canvas as a whole.
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| Picture: Doves/Jon Shard |
“We’re still really excited about trying stuff that we’ve never done and going to places that we as a band have never been to,” Goodwin told the NME in June, explaining that Carousels, the album's lead single, was a good example. “It’s a good harbinger of the album and just a great mission statement. Without having any agenda or a backstory as to what the record is, it just shows off our love of sonic weirdness, atmosphere and energy. We unanimously knew that this would be great as the first thing that people hear of us coming out of the gate after all this time.” Writing together again felt like unfinished business, the bands says, and songs seemed to come relatively freely, the result of having the drive and the renewed perspective to get the album done. “There was a willingness,” says Goodwin. “We were all rooting for it. We fell back into it nicely together.”
There’s a reflectiveness to the songs on The Universal Want: its title track recalls the acid house era while Broken Eyes addresses, according to Goodwin, “some of the casualties in my past”, adding: “We shouldn’t be afraid to reference the damage that life can do.” Cathedrals Of The Mind is another one, reflecting somewhat on time’s passing. It was, says Andy, one of the first tracks in development that caught Goodwin’s ear. “It’s about being haunted by someone,” Williams says. “It’s usually the case that you write subconsciously with people in mind, without the song being written about them.” With its gentle intro, it quickly builds out into a beautiful song of absence, but also one with a very different sonic texture to Doves material gone by. And ingeniously so. Here, then, lies the keynote of this album. There is a maturity to it all, perhaps the inevitable result of time spent apart as much as ageing. “Or it could be Doves as grown-ups with responsibilities,” says Goodwin, “gazing wistfully at our salad days, not going home for whole summers of freedom and to hell with the consequences.”
Having played its predecessors to death over the last 20 years - and unashamedly so - I was beyond excited when Carousels appeared as a single in June, followed by a second, Prisoners, in July which Goodwin explained at the time was about a “yearning” the band had always had. “Just over the horizon, there’s always something better,” he told the NME. Those two events created the expectation that something was indeed better, just over the horizon. With the release, today, of The Universal Want, that horizon has been found.
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