'Last Broadcast' & 'Lost Souls'

It's odd to me that in this day and age of the Internet, MySpace, YouTube and iTunes that I could go these 29 years without knowing anything about Doves, a British band that apparently has created two separate albums that someone decided I should hear before I die.

I suspect two things are at play: They're British and were never big in the United States. And they group themselves with bands like Spiritualized, Muse and Sparklehorse.

These bands all came up and kinda peaked in the mid- or late-1990s and somehow collected some kind of fandom without me realizing it and then years later I turn around at a rock and roll festival and 3,000 bobbing heads are digging Sparklehorse.

I think these bands were probably very disintersting for my 16-year-old self
and by the time I was old enough to embrace bands like this they were still pretty disinteresting. Except Spiritualized. I like them.

Doves are very generic. Kind of a modern wall of sound with bare-minimum melodies and layers and layers of sound. Unless you go soft or heavy, you need to bring the melody or I'm out. Look at Oasis. They got it. They didn't want to be too loud or too soft, but what they brought had substance and goodness.

I really don't get bands like Doves. No doubt if they played a concert today in my backyard, there'd be thousands and thousands and people there. People that have listened to Doves for 15 years while I read every guitar magazine between the years of 1994-1999 and if they mentioned the band then I completley missed it.

They're just so generic. They're an independent rock band probably not making any money and collecting no real fame and yet they continued to record lousy, boring, uninspired music.