Only Doves could get away with titling an album that sounds like this as "Kingdom of Rust". It's a title that immediately brings to mind images of decay and disintegration, and one would normally imagine that such an album would be a gloomy trip through minimalist terrain mapped out by Joy Division and The Cure in the early 1980s. But then again, this is Doves that we're talking about, and even though there is melancholy here, everything is super-sized, sweepingly epic, and full of almost unreasonable amounts of bright, shimmering noise. In the world of Doves, you either go big, or you go home.

In this regard, "Kingdom of Rust" could be a decent substitute for those who were disappointed by the latest U2 album. Certainly, it's easy to imagine these tracks being belted out in a stadium somewhere, complete with comically oversized guitar amps and a gratuitous light show. Frontman Jimi Goodwin also has the advantage that he seems to share Bono's passion for social justice, but manages to do it without being tremendously smug and irritating. "Kingdom of Rust" also manages to catch the ambience of early U2 music quite well; when you look below the surface of their music, it's easy to imagine the bleak landscape of massive, rusting factories that the band came from.

This is, obviously, the inspiration for the title "Kingdom of Rust"; the industrial rust belt in the northwest of England that the band hail from. It's not a new theme for the band at all of course, their breakthrough single 'Black and White Town' is clearly about the class divide that exists in these areas, but the theme can be clearly heard on pretty much every track on this album, giving it a cohesion that their previous full-length works have sometimes lacked.

Kicking off with Jetstream, the album starts in familiar territory for Doves fans, fading in very slowly with skittering percussion in the background providing a backbone for the song. Chiming guitars and occasional electronic flourishes are slowly included into the song, building up gradually enough that by the end of the song when the whole band whips up a maelstrom of noise, it's difficult to know where it all came from.

The title track on the other hand, starts out with a vaguely folksy acoustic guitar riff, supplemented by menacing, brooding strings that burst into a spaghetti western melody during the song's second verse, a technique that was used to great effect on The Panics 'Take Us Home' recently, and which is equally effective here. Muse-like electronic warblings are used on the faster-paced The Outsiders, while 10:03 completely changes direction about halfway through from a R.E.M style ballad complete with chiming guitars, into a fast, hard rocker.

The second half of the album is a touch weaker; the quiet and gentle Birds Flew Backwards is a solid effort, but sounds like it was included just so that the band could say that they had a quiet acoustic effort on the album. Compulsion is an interesting mix between Franz Ferdinand style funk and David Gilmour-esque guitar fills, that ultimately ends up feeling a little daggy by the time it finishes. And while Lifelines is probably the most accessible track on the entire album, it feels a little bit too close to the Coldplay arena rock equation for comfort.

Still, if the most damning criticism of this album that I can come up with is that it sounds a little bit like one of the most successful bands of the decade, then Doves can't be doing too badly. "Kingdom of Rust" is probably the band's most consistent album yet, and while only time will tell if it has the staying power that "The Last Broadcast" has had, I'd say it has an excellent chance of still being in your playlist come Christmas.