Artist: No Doubt
Label: Interscope Records
Release: 2012
Length: 51:50
Rating: 4.5/5
Hardly any comeback by a commercially successful 90s band pays off after a deep, long stretch of hibernation. I’m talking about the new No Doubt album. It’s the group’s sixth studio effort, finally following up »Rock Steady«, released in 2001 – which, to this day, has sold three million copies and earned double platinum certification on US soil.
In the meantime, through the first decade of the new millennium, all the media megaphones gave us was news about singer Gwen Stefani’s successful solo career. The groundwork for »Push And Shove« goes back to 2008, and a smaller US tour in 2009 hinted at the band getting back to work. But the bulk of the work on the new album’s material was done together in 2010, and the band then polished and detailed it in a recording process that ran fairly long, right up to the release this September.
»Push And Shove« packs all the punch its title promises. The band never hid its appetite for commercial success and for pleasing the masses. To that end, the new album comes with two singles, for the tracks Settle Down and Push And Shove. Both are a mix of reggae, funk, dub, hip hop and infectious pop melodies, hitting their expressive peak in aggressively catchy choruses. Both are instantly catchy, instantly winning, upbeat, and definitely calculated to sell by the truckload. In the arrangements they’re masterfully woven together, with all the makeup of programmed samples, plus synth stabs outlining eighties new wave. You can’t fault them for a thing. They carry out their mission perfectly, helping fling this album’s gates wide open for a breakthrough among the most successful releases of 2012. Within a week of release the album sold over 115,000 copies and landed at number three on the Billboard albums chart. Whether the band will put out a single for Sparkle too is hard to believe, even though it’s yet another served-up story of boldly mixing dub with reggae, delicately dunked in pop palatability, but its emotional chorus doesn’t bring the kind of directness of those two singles, which go at the ears of any random consumer far more aggressively.
Still, for those of you looking for more, meaning the more demanding listeners, or let’s say those after greater sonic refinement and more classically cut tunes, the rest of the album offers quite a few more interesting moments of No Doubt’s creative reach. Across the remaining nine tracks you’ll find a refined merging of prominent guitars in the accompanying phrases, with synth dialogues superbly woven into them – the latter sonically conjure the vibe of the golden eighties new wave movement, while the otherwise polished pop finish of the material often bows to the alternative rock character No Doubt actually come from.
One More Summer, in the glow of the retro new romantic wave of the eighties, could have been a real hit for the band, had the song been born back when that trend was current. The guitar phrase in the pre-chorus and the middle instrumental section doesn’t hide its second-half-of-the-eighties post punk sentiment, while the pop catchiness of Gwen Stefani’s sugary vocals even draws sisterly parallels with her solo single One. No Doubt make sensible use of the flirtation between pop and rock through the prism of current sonic arrangement trends in Hot Looking, where they lay down yet another instantly catchy chorus hook. The eighties new romantic is once more emphasized, more generously, in the moody Easy. In Gravity the band solves most of its arrangement moves with a whole array of synth blankets crossed with bold integration of programmed loops, which in the chorus pull toward a blend of the retro sentiment of Phil Oakey’s Electric Dreams, only it’s all slyly tucked into the trendy production of today, as the clichéd but precisely placed »Coldplay transition pattern« on the keys points out (a similar trendy backdrop sustains the later intro of Undone). Undercover and Heaven deliver a similar experience, where the excellent combination of Gwen Stefani’s vocal dialogue with the crunchy synths of the eighties new wave moment comes to the surface again.
The closing Dreaming The Same Dream is the album’s moment where the band triumphantly sums up its retro nostalgia for the sound of the eighties and weaves it into a catchy melody that grows into an excellent final crescendo. This track creates a perfect blend of post punk with the intelligent use of the synths of eighties new wave sound, leading to a moment of hypnosis in the outro. In fact, the mood-shifting turning point of the song is an excellent instrumental part, a deft dialogue between guitar and orchestrations, which tips the song from that point on into a graded buildup of highly vibrant atmosphere toward a peak with an outro that Simple Minds would have loved to hear back in the eighties. The contrasts between the building blocks of the sound picture are outstanding, and the closing gets its emphasized depth from the generous kick-drum thump in the sonic backdrop.
The choruses practically compete over which one takes the lead, and in the eighties or early nineties »Push And Shove« would have reaped an even, even bigger commercial success. So this realization answers the question of whether No Doubt kept their credibility or lost their bearings in the new times. In full measure they’ve delivered an album you can’t take anything away from or add anything to, because they tackled the thing from the end of the musical story that they carry and command in the pinky of their left hand. Ten years of studio silence is certainly more than just a useful stretch for piling up, among a heap of ideas, a heap of ones that clearly stand out in quality. The chemistry of getting the quartet properly warmed up to creative working temperature hasn’t faded, and it doesn’t go out for the new times either.
No Doubt haven’t lost a single grain of their creative charge. Their innate knack for intelligently merging the melodic hunger of crafted pop rhetoric, seasoned with many genre cues – from more aggressive dealings with dub and hip hop to refined servings of retro funk, alternative rock character, new wave and post punk – they’ve masterfully optimized on »Push And Shove«. This highly compatible musical mix that the album »Push And Show« sums up reflects the high level of creative maturity of this band, which also solves most of its moves thanks to outstanding studio mileage and routine. »Push And Shove« is the album with which No Doubt proved that, on one hand, they keep up with all the current trends of modern commercially successful music, and on the other, they hold on to a potent charge of art-minded originality that carries their past work into new times in the best way possible. With »Push And Shove«, after their long slumber, No Doubt passed their maturity test with flying colors.
Lineup
Gwen Stefani – vocals
Tom Dumont – guitar, synthesizer
Tony Kanal – bass guitar
Adrian Young – drums, percussion
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Busy Signal – vocals on track no. 4
Major Lazer – vocals on track no. 4
Stephen Bradley – trumpet, backing vocals, castanets
David Emery – keyboards, programming
Anthony Gorry – keyboards, programming
Stephen Hilton – string arrangements, keyboards, programming
Neil Kanal – programming
Gabrial McNair – melodica, trombone, piano, strings, backing vocals
David Moyer – baritone saxophone
Jonas Quant – keyboards, programming
Fabien Waltmann – programming
Wayne Wilkins – keyboards, programming
Production
Anthony Gorry, Major Lazer, Ariel Rechtshaid, Mark “Spike” Stent & No Doubt
Tracklist
1. Settle Down
2. Looking Hot
3. One More Summer
4. Push And Shove
5. Easy
6. Gravity
7. Undercover
8. Undone
9. Sparkle
10. Heaven
11. Dreaming The Same Dream
