The Doves - So Here We Are: Best Of Doves [2LP]

Small flag: the group is only Doves, not The — to be corrected in the product title.

So Here We Are brings together twenty-five years of the Doves' melancholy euphoria on 2LP, a quarter of a century after the debut that started it all.

The story of how the Manchester trio came together is one of the best in British music. Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Jez and Andy Williams spent the early 1990s as Sub Sub, a dance group with some serious success under their belt, until their studio burned to the ground in 1996 and took everything with it. What they rebuilt was a guitar band, and Lost Souls arrived in 2000, sounding like people who had learned something about loss the hard way. Three UK number one albums and over a million records later, the melancholy has never gone away, just like the euphoria.

There Goes the Fear is still the centerpiece, seven minutes that build and build before dissolving into a hail of Brazilian percussion, one of the great album-closing gestures deployed as a single. Black and White Town sails on a Motown piano rhythm toward something much darker than the tempo suggests, Catch the Sun is pure, widescreen optimism, and Kingdom of Rust remains their finest song, a slow drift with the sound of a place gone silent.

Selected from six albums, and this sounds like a band that never made the obvious record.