Album: Doves

Some Cities, HEAVENLY

While everyone has been waiting for the new Coldplay album - a pop record upon which EMI's share price is apparently dependent, if reports are to be believed - Doves have quietly slipped in to fill the gap with the kind of album that may usurp Coldplay's position as kings of melodic melancholy. At the very least, Some Cities should provide a much-needed corrective to the current inflation of Athlete's meagre talents, offering as it does a more muscular, less narcissistic realisation of contemporary alienation.

While everyone has been waiting for the new Coldplay album - a pop record upon which EMI's share price is apparently dependent, if reports are to be believed - Doves have quietly slipped in to fill the gap with the kind of album that may usurp Coldplay's position as kings of melodic melancholy. At the very least, Some Cities should provide a much-needed corrective to the current inflation of Athlete's meagre talents, offering as it does a more muscular, less narcissistic realisation of contemporary alienation.

In Doves' case, the alienation is tracked through a largely urban landscape, in songs such as "Shadows of Salford", the single "Black and White Town" and the title track. The band's chief inspiration, they claim, came in returning home to Manchester after lengthy tours, and finding the city changed in their absence - old buildings demolished, new structures encroaching on familiar vistas: a concrete-and-glass analogue of the changes that were being wrought in their relationships, as lives inevitably slipped out of sync. Song after song here reflects an underlying sense of loss, an apprehension that things are drawing to a close, from the apocalyptic concerns of "Sky Starts Falling" and "Walk in Fire", to the absences of "Snowden" and "One of These Days" ("It's a girl on the phone/ A girl who's never home"), and the moody regret of "Shadows of Salford".

Unlike the johnny-one-style approach of the Athletes and Feeders, Doves employ an impressive diversity of settings, too, ranging from the moody tack piano of "Shadows of Salford" and the cavernous reverb and Durutti Column-esque guitar patterns of "Ambition", to the a cappella vocal touches in "Someday Soon", and the implacable rolling momentum of "Some Cities" itself. Thanks in part to co-producer Ben Hillier (best known for his work on Blur's Think Tank and Elbow's Cast of Thousands), the various strategies never fracture the album's unity, even at their furthest reach from the trio's basic guitar/ bass/drums formula on a track such as "The Storm", where a mournful, yearning blues harmonica fill keens across the sampled strings of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Snake Eyes score.

The only caveat that I would offer concerns the single "Black and White Town", on which they push their luck a touch too far. If you're going to borrow the intro to "Heatwave", then you had better make damn sure that what it leads into is at least as ecstatic and fulfilling as "Heatwave", and preferably features a vocal as gripping and animated as Martha Reeves's - otherwise, with the best will in the world, the listener may experience a sense of loss quite different to that which you perhaps intended.