Doves

It's time to get out the thesaurus on this one, folks, because there aren't enough adjectives for this sweeping, epic, majestic, etc. work. Doves' first record, Lost Souls, is that amazing and increasingly rare thing: an album, a dozen songs that manage to sound similar sonically and conceptually but separately fresh and exciting as well. It's like these three guys saw our plight from their satellite and decided to come down from space to show everyone how it's done.\nBut they've hardly come from nowhere. Manchester's Doves started out in the mid-1990s as a club/house/dance trio called Sub Sub who failed to catch on in England, having missed the leading edge of the Ecstasy revolution there by about five years. Minor club hit "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)" was quickly filed away with the rest of history's minor club hits. Then their studio burned down. Needless to say, a regrouping was in order. A name change here, a few self-released singles there, and the result is Doves.\nOpening your album with a four and a half-minute instrumental called "Firesuite" might not seem advisable, unless you're Emerson Lake & Palmer. But on this album, it feels like an overture, and a promise of things to come. It's a big, big sound but never dips into overproduction or self-indulgence. The second track, "Here it Comes," introduces the listener to Jimi Goodwin's unique rasp, and classic misfit anthem lyrics like This is a call/a call to all/it goes out to those/who've been bad evoke unlikely shades of Pulp.\nThe album builds so subtly, you hardly notice until you're in its grip. It would seem to peak with the magnificent "The Man Who Told Everything," that is until the booming drum intro of "The Cedar Room," a seven-minute slice of 21st century psychedelia that will floor you the first time ... and the 50th. There's really nowhere to go after that, so the band bows out gracefully with a brief "Reprise" and the acoustic closer "A House," whose opening line It was a day like this that my house burnt down might refer to Doves' unlikely genesis.