Once upon a time, just after the turn of the new century, two young U.K. rock bands crossed the ocean to tour the United States for the first time, supporting their full-length debuts together.*

The headlining band, which featured a goofy-looking singer with sharp blue eyes, was high on the success of an earnest and catchy single called “Yellow.”  An amateurish-yet-endearing video for the song helped secure the band an instant Yankee fanbase.

The opening band, on the other hand, was basically a three-piece helmed by two rather ordinary-looking brothers – unremarkable except for the fact that they were responsible for a critically hailed, near-perfect record called Lost Souls.

We all know how this story turns out.

Though both bands are now four albums into their respective careers, and both have ultimately come to be distributed by Capitol Records stateside, any additional similarities are difficult to identify.

Somewhere immediately after the release of the Joshua Tree-like ubiquity of A Rush Of Blood To The Head, Coldplay traded earnest for whimsical and started prancing about dressed as gay pirates.  It became apparent that singer Chris Martin’s unrealized threat of breaking the band up after the release of A Rush… was less a blessing than a curse when their next two records arrived more mundane, derivative and stillborn than each before it.  Nonetheless, mainstream acceptance persists.

Doves, on the other hand, have gone on to fly so far beneath the radar in the U.S. as to be committed to a flight path beneath Earth’s tectonic plates.  Other than to music supervisors and indie alternative radio, they’ve remained largely unheralded west of the Canary Islands.

So while Coldplay has graduated to playing The Enormodome in a city near you, when Doves rolled into town last weekend, they performed at the same venue as when they last played L.A. a few years ago.  At face, you could take that as evidence that Doves are treading water.

But you’d be wrong.
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