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[+]Simon Reynolds on the trouble with box sets:
“I can’t be the only person who ferociously covets these … yet finds them strangely repellent once they’ve got them. With its packaging resemblance to a coffin or tombstone, the box set is where old enthusiasm goes to die: a band or genre you loved frozen into an indigestible chunk. The audio glut forming a kind of clot in your living environment, a box set is invariably bloated with outtakes, which is to say songs that simply weren’t good enough to make the original cut of albums. With a few exceptions, they are impossible to listen to all the way through, and in a lot of ways don’t seem to be actually made for listening purposes but for ownership and display, as testaments to elevated taste and knowledge. If music is a library, as Bobby Gillespie once suggested, these are the leather-bound volumes that nobody ever cracks open; music that’s been curated to death.”
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