Good to see we're still busy! Caught this review from The Guardian.
Any views? Anyone out there? Anyone other than me got the box set?



The Band, A Musical History

(EMI)

David Peschek
Friday September 23, 2005
The Guardian
If ever there was an argument for the occasional pernicious evil of
the CD reissue, this five-disc-plus-DVD box is it. A Musical History
is certainly comprehensive: it runs from the Band's early backing-
band days - first for Ronnie Hawkins, then the newly electric Dylan -
through seven albums that document their evolution into trad-rock
behemoths. And, for completists otherwise at a loose end, it
includes 37 unreleased tracks.

Critical consensus has it that this is seminal and hugely important
music. But it's clear - especially over five CDs - that it is music
whose ersatz nature, conservatism and ill-disguised fakery attains a
crushing critical mass of boredom. Creating a plodding, hybrid
Americana from borrowed blues and country, the Band have squatted
over a certain kind of North American music ever since their heyday.
But painfully evident in their cod-soulful straining for gravitas is
the lack of the vitality of their influences, smothered as it is by
the deadening weight of heritage. And does anyone need to hear The
Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down ever again?