Already Boxed. Just Add a Little Wrapping December 12, 1999 - The New York Times by Jon Pareles Album Review - Hampton Comes Alive EACH year recording companies dig more deeply into their archives. They are eager to retrieve the obscure recordings that justify expanding greatest-hits collections into the boxed sets that have become fixtures of the holiday market. Theme anthologies are devised; concert tapes and studio outtakes are gleaned; old recordings are remixed. And if there's nothing left in the vaults, then new material is created: electronically assisted posthumous collaborations (as with the latest set by the Doors) or recent live recordings (as with Phish). Here, the pop music and jazz critics of The New York Times assess a selection of this year's boxed sets. (Prices are suggested retail.) (Elektra 62495-2, six CD's $69.97). Phish lives for meticulously plotted whimsy, projecting a perpetual delight in its own cleverness. (The set's title plays off the 1976 blockbuster "Frampton Comes Alive.") At heart, Phish is a progressive-rock band of eggheads in bluejeans, reveling in odd meters, nimble counterpoint and deadpan non-sequiturs. Two complete Phish concerts from Hampton, Va., in November 1998, unedited and unremixed, place boxed-set buyers in the tapers' section of the audience. Both the band's skills and indulgences are evident, from underwhelming cover versions and filibustering vamps to jams that can turn themselves inside out or amble off on rewarding tangents, "expanding exponentially like some recursive virus," as one song suggests. Even on good nights, Phish isn't all pinnacles; three CD's would have sufficed.