Doveland invokes a place of pastoral calm, perhaps a lost corner of the American plains where folk songs might drift across the landscape. Django Django’s sixth album does eventually find its way there, but it takes a surprisingly circuitous route. Song titles like “Meteorite”, “Quicksand”, and “So Heavy” suggest something darker and more muscular. Yet just as the album seems ready to settle into heavy rock, Django Django take it somewhere stranger.
“Meteorite” culminates in a wash of space rock; “Quicksand” is built around an atonal piano motif; and “So Heavy” eventually gives way to delicate, almost jazz-like flute, and beneath it all, the drumming is frequently more jazz-inflected than the straightforward rock arrangements might suggest. Doveland is not really a heavy-rock album at all. It is an album by musicians who seem to regard genre less as a destination than as a collection of roads worth taking.
This eclecticism is particularly interesting given that the album’s creation was supposedly an attempt to simplify. Previously, Django Django’s members worked separately on electronic experiments and acoustic songs. Rather than continuing the band’s established practice of combining everything and trusting David Maclean’s production to make it cohere, they decided to “go back to basics”. The result sounds less like a reduction of Django Django’s musical vocabulary than a more relaxed demonstration of how much vocabulary they possess.
The band’s stated ambition also makes one comparison difficult to avoid. Maclean cites Sgt. Pepper’s as a formative influence and describes Django Django’s long-running pursuit of the perfect album structure, while the back-to-basics drive follows the path the Beatles later took. The similarities permeate Doveland. At their best, both albums marry warm production with a far-ranging musical curiosity, their stylistic detours held together by hooks and melodies that keep the listener engaged.
“Still Life” closes with a buoyant orchestral passage that recalls the playful psychedelia of “I Am the Walrus”. “Dirty Hotel Blues” digs into a greasy blues-rock groove, and together with the loose, joyful folk rock of “Feel All Right” evokes Primal Scream. These are not simply exercises in imitation. Like the Beatles, Django Django seem interested in how much atmosphere and colour they can pack into a concise pop song.
Doveland would sound equally at home in a record collection of 1960s psychedelic rock or 1990s dance-rock. Listening to it had me rummaging through the recesses of my memory for the cult British acts who updated the adventurous but accessible classics of the past for their own era. Perhaps that is part of the appeal: Django Django are finding fresh possibilities in a musical language that has already passed through several generations.
The album’s imagined setting offers another way to make sense of its stylistic wandering. Doveland is a fictional American town, the destination of a road movie that exists only in the band’s imagination. The songs don’t tell that story literally, but the idea gives them a shared landscape: Americana viewed through British eyes, with folk, blues, psychedelia, and rock constantly bleeding into one another.
Yet Doveland leaves me curiously uncertain. The songwriting is consistently catchy, and the production is warm and inviting. There is almost always something pleasing to notice: an unusual rhythmic turn, a change in texture, a new instrumental colour. The music is immediately convincing. What is harder to determine is what, exactly, makes it indispensable.
That may simply be a question of familiarity. Doveland is an album I enjoyed more readily than I absorbed. While it was playing, its succession of ideas made me want to hear what came next. A day later, I was less certain which songs I wanted to return to. The record can feel like a very good snack: tasty, varied and satisfying in the moment, but capable of leaving you hungry again without quite knowing what you were hungry for.
Perhaps that is an unfair standard for a band whose stated aim was not to reinvent itself but to find a more focused way of making music. Doveland certainly sounds like Django Django have achieved that focus. Whether they have also found the distinctive identity that would make this particular journey memorable remains, for me, the more interesting question.