The Law of the B-side states that the luscious dregs of unused material doled out by artists on overpriced import singles and lame movie soundtracks will be sought by only the most devoted fans, who will dutifully mine every last scrap of a band's recorded sound, no matter what they'll be made to pay or where they'll be forced to go. So, I tend to wonder who the audience might be for an official collection of a band's non-album tracks-- and that's without tackling the ramifications of the MP3's rise to ubiquity.
The Manchester trio Doves, however, have a far more elusive nemesis than the MP3 threatening irrelevance for their B-side compilation, Lost Sides: themselves. These tracks are listed as having been culled from the eight singles spanning their 2000 debut Lost Souls and 2002 follow-up The Last Broadcast, but the fact is, more than half of these songs first saw the light of day as bonus tracks on the stateside release of Lost Souls or on a bonus CD accompanying the domestic limited edition version of The Last Broadcast (which is still readily available). Disregarding the two overtly unnecessary "alternate" versions of tracks from Lost Souls, little of the material here is legitimately new to the group's stateside fans.
Releasing a collection of rarities when your entire recorded output has yielded only two full-length records could seem an act of putting the cart before the horse; however, the Doves thankfully exist among a legion of B-side crazy Brits whose alternate material is almost as strong as any of the stuff on their actual albums (even if some of it is pulled from those albums). "Darker", for instance, is a bout of blissfully fuzzed-out basslines, melancholy guitar arpeggios and rolling breakbeats, while the piano-driven live staple "Hit the Ground Running" manages to mutate the Warren Zevon original into a Supergrass-influenced, pub-friendly rocker. "Valley" is one of the finest songs in the Doves' repertoire (it was one of Lost Souls' highlights back in 2000); as frontman Jimi Goodwin sings of "a new day," layers of piano chords clash with ricocheting guitar notes, and delayed loops of vocal harmony rounds create a pastoral chill.
Even the most inspired moments on Lost Sides, though, make it difficult to overlook the embarrassing glut of superfluous filler. Do the Doves' fans really need a pretentious pseudo-classical version of the Lost Souls highlight "Break Me Gently" to introduce the proceedings? How about a Chemical Brothers-aping glowstick nightmare called "Crunch", suited in mid-90s breakbeats and k-hole psychedelia? Or "Down to Sea", a maudlin rewrite of Lost Souls' "Sea Songs" whose sluggish tempo and gratuitous reverb render the exuberant original utterly lifeless?
The most confounding aspect of the domestic release of Lost Sides is that it fails to include the UK version's bonus disc of seven remixes from the likes of Four Tet, Magnet and Echoboy. Had Capitol included these previously unreleased remixes with this collection's stateside edition, it's remotely possible that there would be enough new material here to entice U.S. listeners. Otherwise, for the most part, anyone who wants this stuff already has it.
