About a decade ago, the word "angular" was rarely heard outside of a geometry class, and this was what Mercury Prize nominations sounded like. Doves did enough anthemic rafter-reaching to honor predecessors like Oasis and the Verve. They were also studio-centric and tech-savvy enough to satisfy an OK Computer jones, while having enough British classicism for people not ready to follow Radiohead down the rabbit hole. And there were many of them, to the point where "new Radiohead" (ironically sounding like the old Radiohead) became one of the early new century's most briskly populated UK indie subgenres.
With the possible exception of Elbow, none were better than Doves. So as The Places Between collects the best of the Doves (fortunately, it's not fooling anyone going by "Greatest Hits"), what's striking is how little it bears to the current landscape of rock music on either side of the Atlantic. As Stuart Berman pointed out in his review of Kingdom of Dust, former opening acts like the Strokes and the Rapture both pointed the way for sounds and, more importantly, images that would ultimately make Doves seem stodgy and unsexy by comparison.
Debut Lost Souls remains an enduringly consistent piece of shadowy, orchestral rock, and it could've been well represented here by any of its tracks. Despite being posed as the darkness before The Last Broadcast's light, Lost Souls gets cherrypicked for its most emphatic numbers. "Catch the Sun" remains the strongest melody Jimi Goodwin has ever written, while the harmonica and guitar peals of the misty "Sea Song" exude a low-key ecstacy. Even the stately, string-led waltz "Man Who Told Everything" is included as a truncated "summer" version.
Still, "There Goes The Fear" might stand as their crowning achievement: seven minutes, none of them wasted, rushing forth with an undeniable freewheeling brio and a percussive outro that still stuns (unfortunately, companion piece "Words" and its mawkish U2-isms is included over the luminous ballad "Satellites"). The grand, sweeping gestures of "Caught By the River" would be the most fittingly majestic closer of Doves' career if it weren't for the song that succeeds it on Places Between, which ends where Doves began, the "what if Second Coming went right?" drum barrage "The Cedar Room".
Though Some Cities features what might be Doves' closest thing to a stateside hit (the Motown-bound "Black and White Town"), the record itself lacked the juice of its predecessors, coinciding with a time when Coldplay loomed large and Keane broke. Kingdom of Rust was solid as well, but at this point, Doves were simply a band easy to take for granted, or even ignore. "Andalucia", a new song included here, tends to affirm the reasons Doves eventually opened up for Coldplay instead of the other way around-- Doves' looser rock numbers don't have enough oomph to cover for Goodwin's questionable vocal range and the band's general lack of charisma.
As much as you want to view The Places Between as a triumphant document of Doves' potency, I can't help but feel a somewhat depressing sense of finality-- especially when the tracklist is so stacked toward their first two albums (nine out of the 14 previously available songs. In a weird way, it actually honors the latter two by picking far and away their best songs and reintroducing them. More likely, The Places Between is all about reintroducing Doves as a band to people who initially, wrongly wrote them off.
