Doves – Pyramids, Portsmouth 18/03/09

Doves have been away for a long time: Some Cities is 4 years old. And what are they stepping back into? Their uprush and bombast might just seem a little out of place, things being what they are. We’re supposed to be cultivating our anxieties, averting our eyes, staring at our shoes waiting for the dust to settle… Then again, maybe this is the perfect time for Doves to return. Haven’t they always been about cinematising our little intimacies, the epic in the everyday? Just pop in the next tablet, see what comes…

The Pyramids is an odd venue, tacked onto the side of a leisure centre. As you enter you’re eyes sting at the memory of chlorine; you expect white porcelain tiles and foot baths. It doesn’t function all that well either – they run out of beer, they run out of pint glasses; the staff under their chiselled hair look troubled, inward. As you stand beneath the oddly pyramidal ceiling, decked out in its sheets of chain mail, you feel like you might be inside a giant colander. You wait for the surge of water. Instead Doves come forward, Jimi Goodwin wielding his bass like a hod – the man has gravity. ‘Jetstream’ – the lead track of the new record – is surprisingly immense, and despite the venue they sound huge and loud. On record the track sounds all intro and no song, live it makes so much more sense, it’s a microcosm of the Doves thing – vivid, warm, packing an ecstatic wallop.

I’d managed to get hold of a copy of the new album, Kingdom of Rust, the day before the gig (when I say managed, I mean it – I damn near had to hand my family over as a covenant for not leaking the thing). I’d been a little underwhelmed – it felt a little like Doves by numbers. But on the last listen before I went in, it had started to glow a little, songs and melodies appearing beneath the overtly melancholic sheen. I was expecting them to look old though, older and well, larger. Not a bit of it. Up there they have the glow, the heft I remember of old. It’s us down here, those that have grown up with the band. Look at us with our parched livers and curving spines: lines and lines, hunched into our beers – haggard, weighed down by it all.

The fact that we have all grown up with the band and the fact that this is a promotional tour for the new record does make for a slightly dampened atmosphere early on – the new tracks sound huge and polished but as no one knows them (‘Kingdom of Rust’ and ‘Jetstream’ aside) it’s more a case of polite applause and a sense of expectation. So when it comes, ‘Pounding’ is brontosauran and its met with a roar and a palpable thickening of the air. They follow it with ‘Snowden’, the soaring melody mirrored by the projected images of snow covered mountains. The journey backwards is complete with a rendition of ‘Sea Song’ from Lost Souls. To these ears (clogged with age and ringing though they may be) this still sounds absolutely fresh and vital.

The mid part of the gig returns to the feeling of lassitude as they play a whole bunch of new stuff, and it isn’t until the genius stroke of ‘Black and White Town’ and ‘Caught by the River’ that things pick up again. The former is seriously loud, and Goodwin’s bass is a blubbering thing you feel in your chest cavity and deep in the inner ear. Then with a nod and a smile they’re gone. When they return, they do the now obligatory run through of ‘Here It Comes’ from Lost Souls, which allows Jimi to swap to the drums and Andy to play his wheezing harp solo. Then it’s ‘There Goes The Fear’: if they record nothing else, this song alone will guarantee the band immortality. There is a brief crystalline moment when they are complete, greater than the sum of their parts – masters of a kind of uplifting kitchen sink melancholy, and masters of a peculiar kind of managed ecstasy. They drag at whatever is most defeated in you and throw it to the skies. We gurn gratefully to ourselves as we make our way into the cold night.