I've been wracking my brain this week trying to remember what introduced me to this week's tune. At first, I thought it was via my TV while I was living in St. Louis on one of those music channels that come with a cable subscription...until I realized I'd left St. Louis by the time the single was released. I also thought it might be through MTV--apparently the video isn't available anymore though it was supposed to have been really cool--but I have no recollection of said really cool video. No matter--a good tune is a good tune whether you remember where you heard it first or not....
The Doves (comprised of Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Jez and Andy Williams) met in high school at the age of fifteen, and a few years later started a dance band called Sub Sub. They had a couple of hits on the U.K. Singles chart in the early nineties, but in 1996 their studio burned to the ground, and they decided to start anew as an alternative band named, surprisingly enough, Doves. It would prove to be quite the shrewd move, as their first album would be nominated for the Mercury Prize, and they would go on to have two #1 albums and a #2 in their native U.K. between 1998-2010. The Doves took a hiatus in 2010 and didn't reform until 2018. They released another album in 2020 and it, too, hit the top of the U.K. Albums Chart. For their career the band has released five studio albums and seventeen singles. While they have been quite the phenomenon in their home country, they've never had an album reach higher than #83 here in the U.S.--still they've had a pretty good gig over the past thirty some odd years.
"Catch the Sun" was the second single released from their debut album Lost Souls. The single reached #32 in the U.K., and the album hit #16 there as well. Neither charted in the U.S.
Fun Fact: The Doves worked as Badly Drawn Boy's backing band for his album The House of the Bewilderbeast shortly before releasing their first album. Oddly enough, both albums were nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2000 and the Doves lost to...Badly Drawn Boy.
When I listen to "Catch the Sun" I hear a cacophony of sounds but despite its helter-skelter musicality, it works not in spite of but because of its simplicity--it's just guitar, bass, and drums but you'd swear there's an orchestra behind it. The song--a carpe diem, of sorts--is infused with a measured exuberance both musically and vocally that takes it many steps beyond so many other songs that seek to inspire us in our daily toils. Throw in a chorus that's so catchy it would make the Gods of Pop weep for its aural euphoria, and you have a brilliant piece of pop that makes for another righteous addition to the annals of Friday Night Jukebox.
Lyric Sheet: "Catch the sun, before it's gone/Here it comes, up in smoke and gone...
Enjoy:
Republicans = Nazis
Peace,
emaycee
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