First a little back-story.

There’s a girl on a bus, only on Tuesdays, that has pale skin and red or dark straight-falling hair because shyness permits no lingering gazes to make certain its hue. And there’s a boy that has Tuesday and means to say hi, but catched a too-early bus but its strangely OK. Because for the first time this year a CD that’s good is sent to his office and, bus bogans aside, it makes sitting along by the window not happy but right because two tracks beget a montage sequence in his mind of Soderberg’s Detroit in "Out Of Sight" transferred to the half-light of Canberra, or the UK if you squint and want to pretend.

Yay! It’s the Doves B-Side collection. As here and there as any mish-mash rarities disc, but worthy of stroking because of two songs (no prize for guessing) that make it worthwhile.

‘Darker’ is atmospheric and evocative and other such music-press terms. It has more of a grind (if you know what I mean) than the Doves other gear and it’s sweetly bereft of oboes. It’s the sort of song that flows well into Interpol’s ‘Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down.’

Doves - Darker128kbps 5.4mb
Interpol - Stella Was A Diver and She Was Always Down 6mb

Thanks to the wonders of CD Protection, you’ll have to take my word for this, but ‘Meet Me At The Pier’ is another standout, if simple, track from Lost Sides. It’s nice because Doves vocals can become irksome sometimes, and it’s also without excessive woodwind.

(ed: Thanks to the wonders of the internet I was able to find a copy of "Meet Me At The Pier" despite the fact that the CD is copy protected. Viva la mp3 revolution.)

In it’s place, here’s ‘Was It A Lie?’ from Sleater-Kinney’s 2000 album All Hands On The Bad One, because it’s just a really good song. Listen for the enunciation of the word ‘alive.’

Doves - Meet Me At The Pier 4.2mb
Sleater-Kinney - Was It A Lie 3mb