Haters can hate, but man do I love this show. The knock on this particular year is the sloppiness and wandering jams, but you will not find those here. Nonstop action and a couple serious jams. The first set is as impressive as it looks. Check out that Ghost. A unique take that evokes a dark-circus vibe that really melts face. The Maze sequence is also fantastic.

Set two features an outstanding Piper > Sneakin' Sally that is hot and highly reccomended. What I really want to comment on, however, is that Scents. It's my personal favorite. 2004 captured the band at their most feeble and searching, but also at the height of their expressive powers. The emotion in this song is really unexpected and overwhelming, and given that C-word was next on the radar, it was almost as if the band was saying goodbye to the real stage one last time. The end result is a very sad, yet moving piece that is washed with ambient loops and great work by Page and Mike. This jam should be heard regardless, but if I had to give a reason, I would say that it really helps but things in perspective with where the band was at the exact moment in time. It gives us fans an unabashed inside look at their collective mindset heading in to the final weekend. Some people want to forget, some pretend it never happened, but some, like me, find that there is beauty in this time period. This Scents is a perfect example.

Also worth noting is that the very next day, Phish soundchecked what I conisder to be their best ever piece and my all time favorite jam, simply titled "Check 1". Get it. It is an extension of what I have written above times 10 million. The definitive jam, in my opinion, of the band's career and 30-plus minutes of why I love them so.

I lived off of the Scents and Subtle sounds from this show the way a brokenhearted person lives off the last few vestiges of love at the end of a relationship. The way the guys harmonized...."colors in the void" and then went off into deep space ambient oblivion, the scents of the crowd and the sounds of the scene. Those were the last true "show memories" that I would ever carry with me (or so I thought). Even before I knew that Coventry would turn out to be the trainwreck it was- the last "normal" show of a tour for me was always the last non-festival show. It was the shed, the arena, the stadium where they had to play a standard 2 set & encore show. This song sums up my whole 1995-2004 Phish experience. What begins as innocent and beautiful ends in a majestic cacophony of etherial darkness and reverberation. BOOM. I loved this version!

on a side note, the Yem > Ghost > Maze sequence is really tight. I love the strength of that first BOY! scream from Trey, as if it might be his last one (of course they played it at the next show in Coventry, but I really like the simplicity of the post-tramps jam in this Yem).

See everyone at the Mann in two days!!

Ok. First of all, this show has every true phan's basic dream setlist. I mean, if this show were a greatest hits album, the setlist would live up to it.

Yes, this show has a few weak spots. In the first few minutes of this YEM, Trey just stops for a few seconds trying to find the right notes. In the intro to Sneakin' Sally, the sound is one-dimensional; there is something missing that would make it sound fuller. And Trey's voice sounds absolutely awful in Limb. But if you forget those individual moments and think about the show as a whole, it really is amazing. It has some amazing peaks in the Piper, as well as the Maze>Catapult>Maze sandwich. But what really crowns this show as an '04 gem is the epic space jam of Scents. It brings the show to an amazing close, and may be one of the finest Scents known to phistory. So I'd give a good 5 stars to this show, looking past the small mishaps.

I'll be the first one to admit that there is plenty of great music to be found in 2003 and 2004. This show doesn't have a lot of it, IMHO. The YEM-> Ghost is interesting, and the Maze -> Catapult-> Maze is pretty cool, with a very dark, ominous feel to it. The highlight of the show, for me, was the 20+ min. Scents and Subtle Sounds. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, as it's one of those atmospheric, sometimes droning jams; feedback and fuzz layered richly to make a brooding wall of sound. For some reason, I like those jams better than much of the funk grooves of '97.

Alas, the rest of the show is full of the painful moments, mistakes, and harsh guitar work that were rampant during the dark times. Overall, not the train wreck status that some shows achieved, but certainly unpleasant enough at times. Without the benefit of the aforementioned jams, I'd give it two stars; with them, I think it merits a solid 3.

After listening to this show in it's entirety on The Bunny in VT, I got that weird feeling like they were gonna run outta Steam...little did I know IT didn't matter because here they are 7.5 years later playing that new favorite of ours! Thank you boys for coming back and providing the phans w/ countless more hours of the best stuff on Earth! Phish = Pure Joy!

This show is very rough. In fact I would likely give it 2 stars if it wasn't for the light (or darkness) of an amazing SASS Jam.

Wilson feels off to start. YEM is straight forward, and it has a very interesting vocal jam like segue into Ghost. The Ghost jam feels like another long effort to find footing, it finally gets interesting at the very end when it gets weird. Maze starts strong and YEM shows up again, it then turns into Catapult. It goes into a very rough and off outro to maze. Pebbles starts pretty rough and is standard.

Piper starts rought, Fish aids in finding a jam and it works fairly well. Sally has a nice groove section. Cavern is very sloppy. The remainder of the set is average until the shows white knight SASS. It gets down to business early, as you get sucked into the darkness. It goes very deep and hypnotic. Fish lays a nice beat and Trey throws down some great sustain. Just an all time version so good! It saves the show for me.

Lawn Boy & Frankenstein feels like yet another underwhelming encore.

As is often the case, I remember this show best for some of its context--I brought my mom and little brother to their first show, we got out of the car and promptly saw a Phish mafia fight break out (welcome to the hippy show, mom!); the 30 hrs of traffic to follow en route to Coventry.

This show seemed to take much of oscillating polarity of the 2.0 era to the extreme. The setlist is as good as any you'll find during that stretch. In the show, the first set was fiery. Blistering playing. Sloppy. Wild transitions, but the setlist felt somewhat forced--like they "needed" to drop a great show. Phish is at their best when the music plays them, but alas the tables were turned for this particular night. Fortunately, when 4 of the most talented rock musicians ever to grace a stage together are the ones pushing the music, there are some real heights. Although the Ghost and Maze->catapult sandwich brought some highlights, the second set caught the greatest benefit.

Piper, always a guarantee in 2.0, was it's usual magical steamroller of itself. It's here I'd note that the night was pretty humid and their sound was dirtier than I had heard it...ever. I've always wondered whether the humidity was playing into that extra fuzzy, grungy, feedback-y sound. Sneakin Sally at one moment had perfect harmonies and at the next a rather flat and rushed jam into..Cavern!? Cool. Again, loud, dirty, sloppy. As were the Limb and Julius, and Rock and Roll that followed. The show just kept pushing. As others have mentioned the Scents was truly special. I'll note that not every night would such an ambient and feedback-laden jam work here. But this was the moment that the band stepped back and really saw what this night was. And finally the tension, excitement, anxiety, and the oppressive humidity blended into a primordial musical stew which seemed to echo from one instrument to the next. Yes, this was something that could only happen with this band; something that we'd all be missing all too soon. And just as perfect as the jam was that they walked off in a loop of echoing ambience. No fiery closer tonight folks. That last passage said it all. In case you were wondering, mom's mind was blown at this point. I believe her exact words were "Wow! Is that normal?"

At that time I was sure that it was all just a warmup for what would be the greatest goodbye in music history. Well, can't always be right...

We took the boat from the PA side which was an abridged party cruise. Somewhat of a chaotic scene around the venue: good, bad, and ugly of phish 2004. Little kids playing in the mud 10 feet from a nitrous tank sticks out in my mind. We sat up on the lawn and the sound was really booming through the air that night, with what felt like a split-second delay on the bass. This sow had one of my favorite appearances of catapult, sandwiched in between maze, up there with the sugarbush '94 mini-catapult, and now eclipsed by the dicks 2021 catapult. Was pleased to catch horn and sneakin sally, 2 of my favorite tunes at the time, and as I wasn't going to Coventry, I felt at the time that the SASS jam was going to be my last live phish jam. Glad to be proven wrong.