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

Small flag: the band is just Doves, no "The" — worth fixing in the product title.

So Here We Are gathers twenty-five years of Doves' melancholic euphoria onto 2LP, a quarter century on from the debut that started it.

The Manchester trio's origin story 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 act with a genuine hit to their name, 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 more than a million records later, the melancholy never left, and neither did the euphoria.

There Goes the Fear is still the centrepiece, 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 rides a Motown piano stomp into something far bleaker than the tempo suggests, Catch the Sun is pure widescreen optimism, and Kingdom of Rust remains their most beautiful song, a slow drift with the sound of a place gone quiet.

Hand-picked from six albums, and it plays like a band who never once made the obvious record.