Album Review: Doves' 'Kingdom of Rust'

For a band with bigger name in the Brit alt rock scene, and one slightly better than the rest with a few albums under their belt, their fourth studio album sounds as though it’s their awkward debut.

Doves’ Kingdom of Rust has the right direction, but somewhat mediocre execution and lackluster. There is an air of predictability and the tired feel of familiar chords.

Admittedly, you have to give the band credit, or at least whoever produced the track listing for Kingdom of Rust, for sprinkling the more attractive and listenable songs throughout. With that said, it now logically follows that this will be an album of ups and downs and a pretty good amount of twisting in the middle

Title track “Kingdom of Rust”, though placed at track number two really sets the mood for the record and slightly melancholy and dark framing of each song. Where the verses are plain and tinged with southern guitar, the choruses breathe with an uplifting orchestral backing and some sort of muddled string instrument for a melody.

Unlike Doves’ 2005 release Some Cities, namely their track “Black and White Town”, the rest of Kingdom of Rust is largely forgettable or a little too familiar to be outstanding.

More appropriately, tracks such as “Spellbound” and “Compulsion” would blend quite nicely into a movie soundtrack; the latter has an extremely catchy baseline and a sexy Pink Floyd brand of brooding for an otherwise boring track. Unfortunately, Doves decide to spice up the track far too late unto the song (3 minutes in) with a piano breakdown.

The track lengths also run a bit long, sometimes reaching past 4:30 to 5 minutes, and it doesn’t exactly help the record. At 4:27, the closing song “Lifelines” moves through an ominous stretch of guitar and into an anticlimactic solitary guitar solo, if you can call it that. The entire song is utterly depressing, despite Doves’ attempts to infuse it with bits of life and anthem-like choruses.

It’s not so hard to expect something better from Doves. They’ve proven that they can produce a great album or two, but this record seems more or less like something they pulled together to get another album released.

Hopefully the band is gearing up for future emphatic and upbeat songs – something they are genuinely good at – so fans can more easily forget Kingdom of Rust.

... As seen in The Recorder, CCSU's student newspaper.