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Positive reviews keep coming in for Higher!, the Sly & The Family Stone 4-CD box set released in August. Check them out below!

The highlights burn as brightly as ever: the hot-streak of singles — “Everyday People,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and especially “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” arguably the funkiest song ever conceived — are repped here with punchy single mixes and/or edits. The other great gets are 20 or so minutes from the band’s performance at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, along with an unreleased 1973 live take of “You’re the One” (a single for side-project Little Sister, performed here by the full Family). Higher! is not the place to first meet Sly & The Family Stone — the two-disc Essential serves that purpose — but it’s a solid last-stones-unturned catch-all. – SPIN

The 104-page book rivals the set’s fantastic music, which sounds top-notch thanks to Vic Anesini, as a true marvel. Including photos of studio documents, the band performing live, and in-studio, press clippings, label scans, and so much more, as well as an introductory essay by Jeff Kaliss who has written a book on the group, and track-by-track annotations, it’s as nice of a collection of memories as one can imagine. – Wax Poetics

The exhilarating Sly & The Family Stone retrospective Higher! is a perfect argument for the survival of the boxed set. With 77 songs, detailed in a richly illustrated 104-page booklet/oral history, it traces the genesis of one of pop’s most dazzling savants, Sylvester Stewart, from his days as a Bay Area DJ trying to break into the Top 40, to his formulation of a race- and gender-blending band that brewed R&B, pop, jazz, rock, even nursery rhymes into a funkadelic soul stew. – StarTribune

The new box set Higher! opens with five cuts from Stewart’s earliest days in 1964 recording for the Autumn label in San Francisco, and already, in the rocking novelty answer record “I Just Learned How To Swim,” you can hear the playfulness and exuberance that would be hallmarks of his spectacular run of hits that began with “Dance to the Music” in 1968. …Taking a closer look at his music now, one main characteristic leaps out of the speakers: joy. – Press-Telegram

Reverse-engineering Beastie Boys songs has long been a mini-education in popular music. …In particular, the Beasties’ 1989 album Paul’s Boutique is an overabundant garden of samples — and one of its best is the faithful appropriation of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Loose Booty” on “Shadrach.”

Not that “Loose Booty” needs Paul’s Boutique to validate it. Even though the song appears on the final album made by Sly Stone’s original Family Stone, 1974’s Small Talk, it has all the potency and warp-drive funkiness of the group’s masterpiece 1971 There’s A Riot Goin’ On. By ’74, Stone had shed much of the seething murk of that album and was feeling the pull of his first love: the dance floor. “Loose Booty” obliges. A call to arms — or rather, butts — that compels the listener to “Find yourself some roots to let it all hang out / Get into some dancing, do what it’s all about,” the song’s stuttering strut brooks no argument. And its refrain of “Shadrach, Meshack, Abednego,” a non-sequitur chant that the Beasties based its track around, adds Biblical authority (or at least a fat hook) to the marching orders.

Read more about the Sly & The Family Stone “Loose Booty” sample at The A.V. Club.

Photo credit: Herb Greene

Rolling Stone is showing an exclusive live promo clip of Sly & The Family Stone, filmed in 1973. In the video, Sly and company deliver an energetic take on “I Want to Take You Higher.” It’s a particularly free-spirited performance, with Sly tossing off a brief harmonica solo and dancing across the room in his trademark Seventies get-up. The clip also ends with an awesomely vintage zoom-in on Sly’s face.

Watch the full video and read more at Rolling Stone.

More great reviews are coming in for Sly & The Family Stone’s Higher! 4-CD collection, available now! Here are some of the reviews below:

Higher! succeeds because it performs a task many box sets do not: it tells a story. …The early material is instrumental in laying the foundation for what came later, as they reveal Sly’s deep roots in R&B, doo wop, pop, and rock & roll. …These are grace notes to the band’s enormous legacy, a legacy that is clearly on display throughout Higher!, whether it’s heard on exuberant hits that are pop staples to this day, rhythms that were heavily sampled during the golden age of hip-hop, or a vibrant blurring of boundaries that still sounds visionary. It’s that depth of detail, combined with the masterful sequencing, that makes Higher! such a superb box set: it tells a familiar story in a fresh fashion. Five stars. – AllMusic

Higher! is a succinct, compelling 4-CD journey of discovery … including familiar hits, deep cuts, rare mixes and a number of previously unissued tracks, it makes a potent case that Sly & The Family Stone was the right band for a turbulent time. … Higher! is a marvel to behold, largely thanks to its 106-page book that exceeds all expectations. It’s colorful and lavishly illustrated with photographs, images of 45s and memorabilia, sleeves and other miscellany related to the band’s Epic tenure, and features an essay by Jeff Kaliss as well as indispensable track-by-track liner notes by Edwin and Arno Konings, edited by Alec Palao, drawing on quotes from the band members. A historical timeline puts it all in perspective. Vic Anesini has beautifully remastered the music on all four discs. – The Second Disc

It’s a measure of the depth to which Sly & The Family Stone inspired musicians, men and women, to this day (remember The Family was integrated in more ways than one, no small revolutionary act at its time) that the story told by Higher! is one that continues to connect some half-century after the man first began recording. …The dynamics of Sly Stone’s career were those of his music: the best known tunes of his discography don’t appear here ’til disc three, but the level of interest remains comparably high through the two discs that precede it and on the one that succeeds it, illustrating how fascinating a figure was Sly then and now. – Jambands.com

Along with well known pieces like “Everyday People,” “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” there are a ton of previously unreleased songs from ’67 that make you wonder why they haven’t been available before. “What’s That Got to Do With Me” and “Only One Way Out of This Mess” have aged amazingly well. …There’s a fascinating book included with some wonderful vintage photos of musicians and album/singles covers as well as an analysis of the songs, personnel and times. Important music from an unheralded musical paradigm shifter. – Jazz Weekly

Contemporary artists who follow in the soul and funk tradition tap into our nostalgia for the past and our love of sequels, which are easy to relate to. But they often reduce the oldies to a clean, simple rubric. …Higher! is an important listen, then, because Sly left a lot of his mess out in the open. The aspiring soul-men and soul-women of today should draw inspiration from Sly’s willingness to be weird — to use a thin drum machine when funk demanded heft, to play with the prevalence of rhythm over melody, and to know that the past won’t come back, so the only thing to do is to make the best of the present. – The Atlantic