The Road To Red Rocks: Special Edition ［CD+DVD+LP+BOOK］

With just two studio albums under their belts, it’s an awfully impressive feat that Mumford & Sons can command an audience as big as the one that showed up at their 2012 stop at Colorado’s legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre, but as evidenced by their 2011 Grammy Awards performance, they manage to bring the same amount of energy to the stage as they do to the studio. They’ve been going at a steady clip since the release of their sophomore outing, Babel, which divided critics yet managed to debut at the number one spot on both the U.K. and U.S. album charts. That a group specializing in English folk could turn the heads of so many Yanks would be more surprising if their music weren't also steeped in American bluegrass (almost every one of their songs eventually descends into an easy-to-clap-to hoedown) and this handsome little souvenir offers up a nice snapshot of their unexpected international dominion. Recorded live over two nights in 2012 during the folk-rockers' highly successful Gentlemen of the Road tour, this special collectors box, which is really more of a fancy, hardcover CD book, includes both the audio version and the DVD of the Road to Red Rocks film/documentary, the deluxe edition of the Markus Dravs-produced Babel, a classy collection of photographs that chronicles both the Red Rock show and the more intimate Gentlemen of the Road stopovers, the usual liner notes, and various other Mumford-inspired snacks, resulting in a truly "Deluxe" version of one of 2012's most financially successful releases. ~ James Christopher Monger