Doves Celebrate Their Best on So, Here We Are

Less bombastic than Muse, less self-serious than Radiohead, Doves carved out a nice place for themselves in the turn-of-the-millennium British indie landscape. Most people wouldn’t recognize Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams on the street, yet three of their six studio albums reached number one in the UK. As consistent hitmakers go, Doves have no public image, yet their sound is unmistakable. Like New Order before them, they simply get the job done.

As So, Here We Are: Best of Doves demonstrates, their secret is in making music that is grandiose yet somehow unpretentious. It’s big music with a small ego. Over the course of their 25-year career (longer if you count their early incarnation as Sub Sub), they have captured the dreaminess and catharsis of shoegaze without sacrificing hooks or melody, as shoegaze sometimes does. Their debut, Lost Souls (2000), remains essential, and everything else they’ve done retains a remarkable consistency in sound and tone. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, given that the band often serve as their own producer.

This consistency and refusal to make stylistic left turns also mean, though, that for some people a little Doves is enough. They seemed to agree that their sound had run its course when they took a nine-year hiatus following the lackluster Kingdom of Rust (2009). During that time, a Best of Doves collection appeared, albeit with the main title The Places Between. Ten of the 19 songs on So, Here We Are are carried over from the earlier collection. The rest is filled out with material from their two post-hiatus albums, a standalone single, a B-side, and the obligatory outtake that has been reworked into a “new” track.

As such, So, Here We Are makes the case that Doves were a strong singles band all along. The pre-hiatus material makes up most of the highlights. The fittingly-titled “Catch the Sun” squeezes the last bit of good vibes out of Britpop, and the likes of “Caught by the River” and “Pounding” are hands-in-the-air anthems of the kind Oasis had long before run out of. The twinkling, noir-ish “Snowden” distills the band’s strengths to such evocative perfection it sounds like it was made inside a snow globe.

The tracks that stretch Doves a bit reveal some underappreciated gumption. “Darker” replaces the widescreen wonder with claustrophobic post-punk tension. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine anyone else having the guile to successfully recast the Motown stomp of Martha Reeves & the Vandellas’ “Heatwave” as a working-class fight song, as they do on “Black and White Town”. As for the more recent material, not all of it measures up, but the kaleidoscopic “Carousel” and soaring “Prisoners” are gems.

If there is any weak spot in Doves’ impressive aesthetic, it is the same icy, layered glaze that makes their music so sonically remarkable. The most passionate song on So, Here We Are, the lovelorn “The Cedar Room”, is one of the earliest. It’s as if they quickly decided they no longer wanted to give that much away emotionally. Goodwin’s plaintive croon is sincere, but this is music that washes over you more than it penetrates your psyche.

It’s quite possible that a lot of people will listen to So, Here We Are and find themselves marveling, “So that’s who does that song.” Doves are that kind of band: Quintessentially English, modestly magnificent, and sneaky good.