White Dove Mourning

An interesting review of One Dove's Morning Dove White by Matthew Schnipper, as part of Pitchfork's Sunday Review series of belated reviews (in this case because the site didn't exist when the album came out in 1993). The score of 8.7 is higher than anything it would have received at the time.

At the time, the album was felt to itself be belated -  one of those anticipated albums that takes too long to be made....  (The delay came from a struggle with the record company, who pressurized them to put out more poppified version of the tracks, with radio-friendly mixes).

Reviewers in the UK as I recall felt the album, when it did arrive long after the initial buzz wave, to be underwhelming.... 

Certainly there didn't seem to be anything else on it as amazing as the single “White Love", which appears twice, in the Guitar Paradise Mix and as a reprise.

“White Love” stalled just outside the Top 40.

(They did have a small hit with “Breakdown” after the album’s release).

Listening again, I heard some really lovely tunes that sit somewhere between Saint Etienne and Seefeel – "My Friend”, "There Goes The Cure", “Transient Truth”.

A certain too-pure dream of perfect pop, a distillate of essences too rarified to survive the commercial rough-and-tumble of actual real-world pop…. meets dubby-clubby sounds… wisped through with ultra-breathy ethereal-girliness that places the group near shoegaze. (One reviewer described them as "Cocteau Twins just back from Ibiza").

Part of that Weatherall  moment in UK pop (wasn’t there an initiative called the 98 bpm Movement  slowing the music down from house tempo to a reggae-ish sway?... which would also make it a fellow-traveler with the Bristol sound. *

And then there’s Dot Allison’s voice….  Airy …. almost Medieval at times… a devotional sigh drifting through the cloisters of an abbey....  a sound that joins the dots between Lisa Gerrard and Kirsty Hawkshaw

“Whiteness” is the word.

Despite the dub and house elements, One Dove always seemed a supremely blanched sort of sound

Maybe that’s partly auto-suggestion, from titles like “White Love” and Morning Dove White

But it’s also Dot's pure-as-snow tones.

And it’s also the whiteness of Dot herself...

She looks like she’s made of snow...

A reminder that Scotland is nearer Scandinavia than the South of England.

Talking of the colour white

I can find no confirmation of this out there, but I continue to believe – I wish to believe – that the group are named One Dove as a sly nod to White Doves: an Ecstasy pill of ultra-blissy repute... the kind of pill that makes veterans of a certain era go all “ooh gosh” wistful, pursing their lips and exhaling with the memory rush

                                       As well as "White Doves", there were also Pink Doves and Speckled Doves. According to this drug awareness postcard, though, the Dove wasn't among the highest of MDMA content pills around then.  Perhaps it was just uncut with other things like speed, so it was a purer, cleaner sort of 'classic Ecstasy' lovey-dovey feeling. 

White Dove / "White Love"

Morning Dove White / White Dove Morning…. 

This was music for the afterglow… that 6AM dawn-after-the-rave feeling…. no one around… the city deserted and silent… and you tingling still...  feeling translucent… unbodied... hollowed out by ecstasy

And then the other druggy connotation of “white” would be the “whitey” – a white-out... swooning,  fainting, falling on the floor ….  a pill too strong… or one pill too many

The chorus in “White Love” -  if you can even call that wordless gaseous shiver-shudder a chorus -  sounds like a whitey.... an internal avalanche of bliss...  a deathgasm.

A voice coming, and coming – apart at the seams. Saint Teresa in the throes.**  

Sampled as opposed to sung, this kind of erotic-cosmic oozy-woozy feeling was all over rave tunes  of the era - wordless diva cries and moans, looped into bliss-spasms -  like Shades of Rhythm’s “Sound of Eden”. 

The bliss-spasm isolated / intensified even more on this tune by Pseudo 3

 

That's where the track titles, the sound, and the look (not just Dot's complexion and hair, but on the album cover she's dressed in white too), all these things converge - a meld, or braid, of spiritual and  erotic.  

Songs like sexy psalms

The idea of "purity" seems to nestle somewhere beneath all this - pure love, pure devotion, a pure dose, the perfect prescription. 

Edinburgh's techno temple Pure. 

The cover could be a morning-after-the-night-before tableau - Dot the sleeping beauty... unable to keep her eyes open, her head from drooping... the Other Chaps wasted and drowsy.

Talking of music for the afterglow....

One Dove's "Fallen" featured on this compilation from a few years ago put together by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs: Fell From the Sun: Downtempo & After Hours 1990-91. 

A whole bunch of 98-bpm-or-thereabouts tunes described by the label by the label as "comedown downbeat, sunrise indie-dance and woozy morning moods".

 Tracks like The Grid's "Floatation", BBG's Satie-laced "Snappiness", The Aloof's  ‘Never Get Out Of The Boat’, Sheer Taft's "Cascades (Hypnotone Mix)", Moodswings's "Spiritual High".

The comp's timespan – 1990-91 – shows how past-their-moment One Dove were when they finally dropped Morning Dove White in 1993. 

Fell From the Sun fits the Icarian theme of having flown too high, starting to crash... a still glowing ember.  ("Higher Than The Sun" by the Primals is on there). 

The compilation's title though appears to come from the Opal song, as also recorded by Pale Saints. (The latter's name fits the blanched-by-bliss theme).

Not on the Fell from the Sun comp but partaking of the vibe of that time 

That Creation / indie-dance / post-Madchester / UK house nexus 

 

Afterglow is the name of the first of Dot Allison's - six? seven? -  solo albums.

I did a little interview with her around it for Spin. 

"I Wanna Feel the Chill" was one tune that stood out on a record that otherwise felt a bit subdued by its own good taste.  The eerie guitar lick is sampled from Tim Buckley's "Dream Letter." 

"Chill" - in either of its meanings - again shows an understanding of her thematic matrix.

Exaltation of Larks, from 2007, is another evocative title.

Her latest album Consciousology is on the shoegaze label Sonic Cathedral. 

* Well, I could swear someone telling about a 98 Bpm Movement started by Paul Oakenfold.... but it must have got mangled in the memory: Movement 98 was in fact a Paul Oakenfold project, centered around Carroll Thompson's vocals, and which scored a small UK hit in 1990 with the mid-tempo soul of "Joy and Heartbreak", with melodic elements borrowed from Satie's "Les Trois Gymnopedies".

Odd fact: Rob Davis, formerly the guitarist who wore women's clothing in Mud - was involved as a writer. Later he would make millions as the co-writer of Kylie-smash "Can't Get You Out of My Head".

**

Teresa of Ávila, 16th Century mystic  - a nun of noble birth, she became famous for her visions and raptures (sometimes involving levitations). Jacques Lacan, French Freudian theorist, wrote about Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa. Malcolm Bowie, paraphrasing Lacan, writes about “an unlocalisable and ineffable pleasure-spasm” that inspires Teresa’s enraptured contortions. 

DIY dance (ripe for conversion)

 

This must have been written in mid summer  '91 (October issue means comes out in September, monthly mag means a couple of months lead time). Teetering, teetering on the brink - all it would take is one strong pill to push me into the rave maelstrom. 

I'm glad the most highly charged bit is on LFO's Frequencies. 

the bassline burglars

B-line on this



is versioned aka pilfered

on this



so is the rhythm guitar tic too actually

replayed i think rather than sampled, although not sure

that's a fave Saint Etienne tune of mine - they made good use of the bass and the guitar bit

this is my tune

Dug out this Lovers Rock comp made ages ago by my dj pal Paul Kennedy and was reminded how lovely this song is by The Cool Notes

and also by how uncannily it sounds like Saint Etienne (or rather I should say, how uncannily Saint Etienne sound like it  - in some of their earlier modes at any rate, Foxbase Alpha time particularly)

almost to the point where I'm wondering if Cracknell and the boys covered it

Love that synth solo -  so delicate and filigreed it almost sounds like guitar (and in fact is twined around a guitar solo, doubling the effect)

Dub is nice too



The lyric to  "My Tune" would have fit well with the songs-about-songs, meta-music interblog challenge of 2015 - the singer / group's evident pride in her / their creation... self-reflexively celebrating the seduction-by-hook of the consumer's ear and the fan's inevitable purchase of the delectable product .... a record that enacts its own promise  (shame it wasn't a hit) 

The title "My Tune" could also lend itself to a quite different lyric, written from the consumer / fan perspective - about that feeling you can have with pop songs (or any kind of songs - dance anthems, etc), that this song was made just for you, that is belongs to you - so snugly does it dovetail with your desire, so uncannily attuned it is to your particular audio-erogenous zones

(Well, The Cool Notes tune does contain that idea in the line "I wrote it for the people, I wrote it for you" - but here the addressee is the massive, it's "you" second-person plural i think - as in the earlier line "I write the tunes that you dance to in the blues". The word "blues" itself being uncommon parlance suggests the idea of social ownership of the song)

But yeah when a song on the radio possesses you, takes over your life,  it is like falling in love - that same feeling of extreme fortune and blessing, that heaven-sent matching 

I feel like there is already a song, or possibly many songs, out there that are about just this feeling -  a need miraculously met, the pop song as a personalised transmission....  

it's rather like the way certain stars when performing onstage can seem to meet each fan's gaze .... or how very charismatic persons, in the interview situation or the glad-handing meet-and-greet situation, reputedly can make you feel like you're the only person in the room, that you have ALL of their attention

but this-is-MY-tune also makes me think of the more disordered, hallucinatory regions of fan feeling  and fan-thought (as documented in the Vermorels's Starlust) where the star seems to be speaking directly to the fan, sending them secret messages, coded clues... the eyes in the poster on the bedroom wall piercing deep into you

While we're loving the lover's rock, here's another dreamsong about the dance of desire









postscript 8/25

Ian S in comments points out this rave versioning of Janet Kay



Fernando Ramirez Ruiz nominates Indeep's "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" as belonging to song-as-salvation self-reflexivity syndrome