I gotta say I am pretty darn excited about this release. Many of us, myself included, were so disappointed several years back when Sony put the breaks on the remix compilation they had announced. Now, we appear on the verge of a 19 disc box set chock full of remixes, instrumentals and alternate mixes handsomely packaged alongside their entire album collection and two DVDs of videos and live performances! I certainly never anticipated THIS!
I hate to admit it, but as a much bigger fan of Erasure than Dead Or Alive, I found myself far more excited reading the details on "Sophisticated Boom Box" than I was when the "Moscow To Mars" track list was announced. Of course Erasure's overall catalog of mixes and rarities has been generously curated and made available to fans over the years (thank you, Mute Records), so while a box set is nice, it's not really necessary for us die hard fans who collected along the way. Now we finally have a label willing to work with Dead Or Alive themselves to create an exhaustingly thorough representation of their output (thanks Edsel/Demon Music). After seeng and hearing the quality treatment lavished upon all the recent Bananarama releases, I am confident this will be far beyond what I ever expected from Sony's short lived remix compilation which was ironically D.O.A. on some label executive's desk.
Yes I noticed a few omissions - I personally would love USA remixes of "Baby Don't Say Goodbye" in particular, but we already have an indication there may be more releases in the pipeline that will very likely help fill in the gaps.
I have no doubt our collective picky and detailed bantering here has led to some amazingly thorough and wish-list-fulfilling releases and reissues. So yeah it's important to express what we as fans want and to call attention to mistakes and missteps labels make. But when something this cool happens, we also need to take a deep breath and say, "wow this is awesome, thanks for listening!"