LaRM day 114 (Doors-Doves)

The last of the live Doors-athon is the two shows from 10 April, 1970 in Boston (officially released in 2007). These shows are the beginning of the end for the band because you can tell that Morrison is heading downhill fast. Most of the time he seems fairly disengaged and when he isn't arsing about, he's mumbling and muttering. Again, the first show starts with him having a go at the audience about not sitting down and he clearly isn't all that bothered with the whole thing. Fat, drug-addled and apparently very, very drunk during the performances, I guess it was difficult for him to really focus, and the rare occasions when he does are electrifying. But there's the tragedy of it all right there - even to the last he still clearly had something, and despite his juvenile self-obsession and terrible poetry I think he was a pretty clever bloke who wilfully threw it all away. The two Boston shows are a testament to a band who were quality journeymen behind a mercurial talent, but they also demonstrate that being a working band, with its attendant troubles, particularly chemical, can really be destructive.

The first Doves album, Lost Souls (2000) still sounds like a refreshing antidote to the twin miseries of the last days of Britpop and the advent of Coldplay. Full of meandering, quietly emotionally refulgent epic mood pieces, it's a record that proved that being soul-searching didn't have to mean sounding like a dick. In some ways it's an interesting comparison to Coldplay's Parachutes. Where the Coldplay album is considerably less than the sum of its parts, Lost Souls makes a great impact through fairly simple means. There are a number of decent songs on Lost Souls, but it's best to take the album as a whole single piece really. The real trick to the album I think is that although it absolutely fits the mould of the kind of gloom-pop that was growing at the time, it sits apart by virtue of having a strangely psychedelic edge to the music and by not overplaying the angst in either the vocals or the melody, but rather by letting it come through the whole. I suppose they couldn't really overplay the angst bearing in mind, under the name Sub Sub, they had had a hit with one of the most irritatingly upbeat dance singles of all time a few years earlier.

Second album, The Last Broadcast (2002) is better yet I think, retaining the general mood but cutting back on the quietly unwinding lengthy pieces. There are more obviously melodic songs and there's a more elegaic mood to the whole album. The lightest psych touches are still there but they really serve to drive on the record, and the production is dense, a little claustrophobic even, but that's also entirely appropriate to the material. There are one or two longeurs, no question ('Satellites', 'M62 Song'), but even they serve a vital role in pacing the album. The bigger tunes are really great, from the percussion heavy 'There Goes the Fear' to lovely album closer 'Caught By the River'. It's a record that has slipped from the popular consciousness I think, which is a shame because to me it's a time-defining piece of work, miles better than most of the similar contemporaneous stuff being released at the time. Some Cities (2005) is even more song based (five and a half minutes being the longest tune here, the previous two albums had plenty considerably longer), and although it lacks the pervasive atmosphere of the preceding two albums, it's reliance on pop structure and melody works well. There less opportunity afforded for the listener to drift away from the record this time round, and thematically the band seem to be less wistful, and more precisely driven. There's a strange urgency to the record which is in direct contrast to their previous work and takes a bit of accommodating, but Some Cities has some fine, expertly crafted songs, and on the whole it's a very good album.