The press, in the early ’90s, used a lot of conflicting, if creative, words to describe the music of One Dove. The Scottish band’s 1993 debut album, produced by the DJ and musician Andrew Weatherall, delighted many, disappointed some, and confounded others. Project X magazine, an American publication catering to ravers (which included infamous party monster Michael Alig on staff), put the band’s singer Dot Allison on the cover in a scuba diving suit and declared them to make “some of the most emotion-filled electronic music since the techno-revolution began.” The New York Times called their album “a juxtaposition of eerie, languorous electronics, bleary borderline dance music and quietly torchy pop songs.” The NME, though loquacious, was not convinced. They appreciated that while the band had a “vision of blasting mainstream pop sky high with clubland’s mighty beats and sun-drenched vibes,” ultimately Morning Dove White was “likely to lull you into a light coma.”
Were One Dove here to humanize the mechanical sound of acid house then taking over clubs? Or were their dreamy guitar solos meant to help future-proof the suddenly staid sound of British rock? Was singer Dot Allison a star or a snooze? Was everybody even listening to the same band? To that last point, based on the extensive amount of remixes they released, as well as early album leaks with alternate mixes, it’s possible that, no, they were not.
Regardless, in the 31 years since their sole LP Morning Dove White was released, not too many people have listened to any version of the album. It has been out of print for nearly 25 years, and, until recently, not on streaming services. To add insult to injury, the version available on streaming services now mistakenly repeats track six, “My Friend,” as track seven, “Transient Truth.” “Listen now,” sings Allison on that song, which, if you don’t have a physical copy, you’ll have to head to YouTube to hear, “If you take my words as promises, well then you can keep them.” At least they never felt like they owed anyone anything.
Undoubtedly some of the hype surrounding the album isn’t even of their own making: The band had persuaded Weatherall—renowned for his sledgehammering of genre barriers—to produce their debut. This was immediately after he’d worked with Primal Scream on their groundbreaking album, Screamadelica, which was released to great fanfare during the recording of Morning Dove White. That album’s massive swell, its groundbreaking blend of ecstatic rock guitar work and buoyant house music drum work, became Weatherall’s signature sound. He’d bring some of that in a more subdued form to Morning Dove White. That’s undeniable. Whether he also brought unmeetable expectations is up for debate.
Morning Dove White begins with “Fallen,” their breakout single. Legend has it, when One Dove—the trio of Allison, guitarist Jim McKinven, and keyboardist Ian Carmichel—was pursuing Weatherall, they met him at one of his DJ sets in Italy. They slipped him a copy of the “Fallen” single, which Weatherall played on the spot to warm reception. The next day, he played them Screamadelica demos on the beach before agreeing to collaborate. Fact or fantasy, a Mediterranean origin story is befitting. It often sounds like the music’s been bleached by the sun.
Weatherall has a cosmic sleight of hand that takes a song’s naked bombast and cools it with a lithe touch. He doesn’t reduce its power, just softens its edges. When Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie quietly coos that he’s “higher than the sun,” it has a churchlike echo that feels like a bad boy’s manipulation of holiness. On a more practical level, Weatherall really likes drums you play with your hands—congas, bongos, djembes. Both Screamadelica and Morning Dove White are dripping in Weatherallisms. But those expecting a repeat of Screamadelica misread the direction of his creativity. It moves in all directions at once, not linearly. If he made One Dove sound more like anyone, it’s themselves.
“Fallen” was written without Weatherall, though he did rework it for the album. But hearing the original (at least, one of the original of the three pre-Weatherall mixes) proves they didn’t need him to craft an ebullient slice of weirdness on their own. Playing the two versions, pre-Weatherall and post, back to back, you hear some subtle tweaks, but it’s more like Weatherall took the track and recommended cleansing it with incense. It’s still the same song, only tender. The original version included a spoken intro making clear the lyrical reference to “angel from this dream I have” is a nod to The Catcher in the Rye. On the version that opens the album, it’s been cut, as though he encouraged them to keep their cards just a little closer to their chest. A little mystery never hurt anyone.
To that point, the primary vocals on the song are whispers. Allison mostly doesn’t sing, and when she does, it’s buried in reverb. She talks hushedly about secrets. You can hear a tinge of her Scottish accent. “Don’t know why I’m telling you any of this,” she says as the song begins. It’s like she’s pulling you close for a tête-à-tête: listen up, this is important. “One thing is, don’t ever tell anyone I told you this.” Is she talking about One Dove itself? After a couple decades in relative obscurity, it feels like it.
Like most of the songs on Morning Dove White, “Fallen” is a dance track from a rock band, not the other way around. Never the other way around. You can always sense their roots in regular old guitar music as part of a song’s structure—there’s often a hint of reggae in the guitars and drums—but it’s not what thrills about a track. That’s in the discovery of everything else they can do to accent it. Listening to the album could be a portal to rave culture, soul, dub, trip-hop, even the radio pop of the era. The music vibrates with so much excitement that you get the feeling, for the members of the band, still so young, making Morning Dove White was as much about discovery as it was about declaration. “We each bring a lot of ingredients,” Allison told Spin in 1993, “but together we bake a new cake.”
With so much going on, it’s a miracle the album never manages to trip over its own feet. The songs, long and sprawling, move in and out of genres with little regard for consistency. But they all congeal. Track two, “White Love - Guitar Paradise Mix” opens with a lurching guitar solo, a minute and 45 seconds of something that sounds lifted from Metal Machine Music. Then hip-hop drums break out and trippy keys turn the whole thing into Deee-Lite worship. Track three, “Breakdown - Cellophane Boat Mix” (what is a cellophane boat?), opens with more hip-hop drums accented by a lovely piano run. Dubby bass enters, then the sound of a record scratching before the whole thing turns on a dime at what sounds like the ding of the oven announcing it’s been preheated. Allison saunters in gently. “Breakdown and cry,” she croons over the returned piano chords and the whoosh of an egg shaker. The chorus ends and the oven dings once again. Then a man intones what sounds like a Laurence Fishburne line in The Matrix, a movie still several years in the future. “Against the black-blue sky, the shadow of the dove. The gentle wind’s diversion. An open mind’s excursion.” Allison finishes things up with a breakup lament and a shout-out to the moon. “Sirens” makes room for two solos, one on a bluesy organ solo and the other on an accordion. It wraps things up with a twangy guitar strut. What even is this music?
Allison has referenced the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as a touchstone for Morning Dove White; McKinven the music of dub originator King Tubby. Those are two vastly different source materials, though what they share is a love of resonance and reverb, creation of a vastness as funneled through the mixing board. Weatherall is a producer in the lineage of Brian Wilson and King Tubby, futzing around with the knobs so that a song swoops and whorls. The Beach Boys deployed this experimentation in small doses, accent pieces in their perfect pop songs, whereas King Tubby and Weatherall built songs around the echoes themselves. Neither met a song they couldn’t extend. Single-digit running time? Amateur hour. Weatherall could always squeeze more out of any tune.
Most of the songs on Morning Dove White are 10 minutes or above—plenty of room for them to not only delight but to mesmerize. “My Friend,” the closest the band gets to actually making a techno track, rides along at a mid-pace, bolstered by gauzy vocals from Allison, a snare roll echoed to infinity. Everything builds and builds, while you breathlessly await an explosion. It never comes. “There Goes the Cure” wafts out the gates at a leisurely clip, with Allison’s voice doubled, maybe tripled, with a small choir behind her. She even literally sings about echo while being echoed: “Losing a shadow/Losing another soul/So many echoes/And oh/No more.” The congenial piano riff repeats while the sound of digital crickets breaks, briefly, into the sound of screams. A string section builds, fades. “He’s gone,” Allison repeats for several minutes. Again, no explosion. Climax was never the point.
I’ve been trying to figure out why Morning Dove White disappeared from public view for so long. The band recorded some of a second album, but broke up before it was finished; those songs were never released. Surely a continued lack of presence did not help keep up their profile, but they did tour behind Morning Dove White and, after the band’s breakup, Allison released several solo albums. One in ten people I ask about the band gush about how much they love them and how unfairly ignored they have been. The other nine don’t know who I’m talking about. Was it the sepia-toned album cover, a dour brown so unbefitting of such a bright piece of music? Was Weatherall’s presence, ostensibly so crucial, actually an albatross around their necks, a high-profile co-conspirator whose adjacent work eclipsed their one moment, dooming them to never have another? Or did One Dove, so eager to work with disparate sonics, aim for the future and miss?
There’s some weight to that argument, as, with the ease of technological collage, so much of music continues to ignore genre in favor of cannibalization. But as I report live from the future, I can confidently say Morning Dove White is not the sound of our modern dystopia. Even with its lyrical hints of tough breakups and pining sadness, it’s simply too sweet a record for our sour times. It’s fresh, alive, searching. Eternal qualities. Morning Dove White isn’t a record of any certain time; it’s a classic.
